Heh! After yesterday’s 110° at 7 p.m., we’re having a balmy afternoon today. At 4:30 in the afternoon — usually about the hottest point of the day — we’ve only barely reached the 110 mark. Brrrr!
Taking advantage of the crisp temperature, I sallied forth to the Safeway, there to buy some eye salve for the poor little dog, plus a whatnot or two. Truly hotter than the hubs on those black asphalt streets.
Safeway has invented a new annoyance: if you want to buy wine or other boozy beverages, they try to steer you into a dedicated checkout stand in the liquor aisle. Took a second or two to figure that out…
Right, guys. Like I want to stand in line to pay TWICE! Once for food and household items, once for a bottle of Chardonnay.
Criminey. WHO thinks this stuff up?
Oh well. When I expressed my annoyance, I was excused from the booze department line and allowed to buy all my groceries with a single pass-through at the front-of-the-store cash registers.
Man! My air-conditioning bill is gonna sail through the stratosphere this month. Here in the front room, the temp is 80 degrees, with the AC unit pounding away nonstop. But in the front guest bedroom, where Ruby and I have taken refuge from the present heat wave, it’s 78. That’s because the room sits directly under the AC unit, and its vent is the first vent that comes out of the machine.
By the time it reaches the family room, where I’m poking away at the keyboard right now, it’s in the low 80s. And the unit does not go off. Nope. Not once, not alllll dayyyyy long! That’s even though the thermostat is in the hall right outside that refrigerated bedroom.
No sign of the mid- to late-summer monsoon weather. Usually by now we have rainstorms that coalesce late in the afternoon and hold forth from around 4 or 5 p.m. on into the evening. This phenomenon cools the air significantly, sometimes to such a degree that in theory you could cut back on the AC bill.
Not this year, though! Not so far.
No doubt Ruby wonders where her dinner is. Poor beast!
I’m holding off on feeding her until the sun goes down — that’ll be another 2 hours or so — so that if and when we go for an evening doggy-walk, the pavement will be cool enough for her to walk without burning her feet. Even so, if we wanted to cross the street, we would have to wait till around 10 p.m. for the asphalt to cool. The sidewalks we can manage awhile after sundown….the roadways: not so much.
Ruby has a low-level eye infection…i think. Either that or allergies. Nothing much grows at this time of year that ought to trigger allergies, so the hypothesis is either an infection or dry eyes. My doc has me wiping my own dry eyes with something called “iVisia,” which seems to help a little. Tried it on Ruby, and found that yes, it’s seems to work on her, too.
But…go ahead! Just TRY to find it.
Found it a few days ago at the Safeway….but today when I picked up another bottle and brought it home, I discovered the stuff I’d grabbed off the shelf is a gel, not the liquid drops.
arrrrghhhh! AM i going to traipse back through the heat and the lunatic drivers to return that?
I dunno. Really…some things are just. not. worth it.
Speaking of “not worth it,” have you seen THIS little bit of intelligence? Robert Kennedy’s nutty son is busy spreading crackpot conspiracy theories…as part, it appears, of a projected run on the presidency.
Holy sh!t.
Are there, d’you think, enough anti-vaxxer ignoramuses, enough paranoiacs who believe 5G networks are a tool to spy on us all, enough conspiracy theorists who imagine the CIA put out the hit on RFK Sr. to carry this nut case into the White House?
Holy sh!t. Truly. If there are, I am moving to Venezuela. Or better yet: to a desert island in the middle of the Pacific. 
