Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, August 13, 2023, or: Weekend Update, Part the Second – Hot as Hell Edition

Midday/Early Afternoon, Sunday, August 13, 2023, Lithia, Florida

“An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!” – Rudyard Kipling, The Road to Mandalay

The Tampa Bay area is nowhere near Mandalay, Burma. Nor is it across the Bay from China, for that matter. But summers here – as well as in my old stomping grounds in South Florida – have become hellishly hotter over the past two decades, and the sun, when it climbs up above the horizon in the morning, does “come up like thunder.”

As I write these words, we are under an Excessive Heat Advisory for the second day in a row. Outside, the temperature is 92°F/34°C under sunny conditions. With humidity at 57% and a weak easterly land breeze blowing at 3 MPH/5 KMH, the heat index is a scorching 106°F/41°C. That’s bad enough, but the forecast calls for a high of 97°F/36°C, so it’s bound to feel hotter than that by midafternoon.

It’s so hot out there, Dear Reader, that even though I’m safe and comfortable inside an air-conditioned house, I can feel the heat seeping in from outside; the sun is hitting the side of the house directly, and the temperature is so high that it travels through the concrete shell of the house. I know this because I am in my stocking feet and can feel the heat near the floor.

Ugh. I hate summer in Florida…though I think that most of the Deep South, including Texas, is as bad or worse during the “mean season.”

Weekend Update, Part the Second – How I Spent My Saturday

Yesterday was, predictably, another one of those Saturdays that aren’t amazingly wonderful or incredibly terrible, but rather tolerably mediocre. I wasn’t bored, and I wasn’t uselessly inactive, but I wasn’t particularly happy or even content. I just…existed and aspired to somehow improve my lot in life, while I sometimes mourned the life I left behind after my mother died in 2015.

As I expected, I ended up doing several of the activities I listed in yesterday’s post. I did work on the manuscript of Reunion: Coda for about an hour. I focused mainly on re-reading the first scene in Chapter 11, made a few tiny but necessary revisions, then closed the file on Word. I don’t plan on opening that document until tomorrow – it’s Sunday, after all, and thanks to another unwelcome bout of insomnia, I went to bed around 3 AM and woke up just five hours later.

I also:

• Listened to music (both on YouTube videos for individual songs and on Amazon Music for complete digital albums)
• Read (in dribs and drabs) bits from several books
• Spent time on social media (X, Facebook, and Instagram)
• Watched – or tried to watch – The Peacemaker and Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• Played Solitaire on my PC. I thought about playing Crusade in Europe or Regiments but changed my mind cos I didn’t want to invest over an hour playing those two games (even though they are among my favorites)

And there, Dear Reader is my Saturday in a nutshell. Not horribly bad, I will admit. But…not amazingly great, either.