Month: July 2014

I’m told the saying originated in India–only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun. I love it because I’m always wondering at the people who just go about their business despite the heat. How? On Sunday it was a little cooler than it has been around here—the temperature only got up to 100°. It’s the monsoon, though, which means higher-than-usual humidity. That means my swamp cooler, which does a fine job in dryer times, struggled to keep the temp in the house below 90°. When it’s 90° in the house, there’s an awful lot of lying around being lazy going on. Sometimes I poke the cats, just to be sure they’re still with me. We utilize the usual coping strategies—watching movies with lots of snow, sitting on icepacks, keep the fans on high and all papers nailed down. Sometimes I browse realty listings in Alaska.

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Here we are again with another progress report.  This one covers April, May, and June. (For reference, here is my 2014 Manifesto I wrote back in January.) As it turned out, I got a lot of things done.  Some are still in progress.  But overall, I feel pretty darned good about it.

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I have a secret, friends. I love learning. And more than that, I love school. Oh, sure, back in the day I loved my summers of freedom (though for several summers in high school my friends and I had a “Shakespearean Acting Troupe” which always started off as a real attempt to put on a Shakespearean play–roles assigned, scripts purchased, rehearsals mounted–but invariably ended as an excuse to make our parents let us hang out three times a week all summer), but there was also always something enticing about heading back in, with new classes and new subjects. College was a little different–more like the fun of learning had been drained out of it. When I look back at college, there were some classes that I remember, but more I remember what I did outside of class–crew, and more Shakespeare, and hijinks and camping trips and…

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Imagine this: You are in a community hall. On the stage, a band is playing traditional folk music, led by a fiddler. In the hall, people are dancing until the wooden floor bounces — the whole room moving in unison. You are dancing with a partner, but you are also dancing with a whole line of other people at the same time, alternating between twosomes and foursomes and everybody. Onstage, a caller is shouting out the moves. But you’ve gone through the sequence several times and it’s in your body now, you can flow smoothly from one move to the next, your momentum carrying you and buoying you up.

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