Not to harp on the weather, but this heat and humidity is relentless. Both Don and I are in bad moods. With the heat index routinely around 104 degrees, it’s hard to think, let alone come up with a sunny mood.

But we try. We try. We may have some storms today, but I’ve learned not to trust those forecasts this summer. In the meantime, I spent hours yesterday adding up figures in my quest to gather together our deductions. We need to submit them to our Tax person by next Monday. I got a lot done, but I find that I can only work in the morning in this weather. By afternoon, I’m fried. So, I have to divvy up my time between dialect prep and tax prep this week. I’m supposed to work with Jim later in the week, so I have to get all my ducks in a row.

The coneflowers are drying up early this year, which breaks my heart. Even those steady little dependable flowers can’t withstand the relentless heat. Oh, and the bunnies ate all the blooms off my zinnias. I had to break it to Don that he won’t see his favorite flower this year.

Spring and summer lover that I am, I am ready for Autumn. I can’t imagine how farmers feel when faced with a drought. I feel powerless, even when it involves only my little garden. But when it’s your crop and your livelihood, my goodness! How awful it must be.

As soon as I finish this post, I’ll go out and hand water things. I briefly considered letting it go because we might have rain later. Nope. I have to do it, because what if it doesn’t rain?

But Don made an apple pie, so there’s that! And we had sugar-free vanilla ice cream!

One additional thing about Blythes – there are some customizers who routinely command high prices. Prices I could never afford. You’ll start to notice who they are. They all do beautiful work and have a distinctive style and to a collector, those dolls are worth the price. Remember, we’re talking about Art Dolls, highly collectible creations with resale value. Anyway, there are plenty of beautiful dolls out there that are reasonably priced. One other note: you might see a price of several thousand dollars on an Etsy listing and that’s usually because the doll has been sold and the seller wants to keep it in the listing so that potential buyers can see their style. That confused me at first. They price it high so that you know it’s gone and/or would never even think of paying that much.

Okay, my friends.

So sad that Mar-a-Lago was raided. Well, technically, not raided. A search warrant was executed.

I’m crying big old crocodile tears.

Stay safe.

Happy Tuesday.

The limelight hydrangeas are in bloom. A small bush, planted maybe 7 or 8 years ago, is HUGE! Every year it gets fuller and fuller.

But my little hydrangea that I planted in the chicken wire fence garden had only one bloom this year. That has never happened.  I do believe it gets too much sun, especially this year, but the blooms weren’t appearing even before the heat wave. I’m scratching my head on that one. I may need to move it.

This heat wave is never-ending. On and on it goes, through Monday or Tuesday. It’s too miserable to be outside except in the early morning. We did get a bit of rain yesterday. A bit. We had a gentle rain shower early in the afternoon. It probably lasted 10 minutes. Then in the late afternoon, we had another shower of 10 -15 minutes. But in each case, there was lots of thunder off in the distance and neighboring communities had big storms. Nothing here.

If only this could happen in the winter instead; everyone else gets big snowfalls, and for some strange reason, we get nothing. That  I would be happy about.

But some rain is better than none and I’m grateful for it, if only for the fact that I don’t have to hand water this morning.

I’m going to do some prep work this morning on one of the shows I’m coaching. At some point this weekend, I am going to put the puzzle back in the box and free the kitchen table for tax deduction work.

Exciting weekend, right?

We’re going stir crazy, but only because the heat and humidity is so bad and has been for over a week and a half.

Sigh.

Stay safe.

Happy Saturday.

Thanks so much for all of your wonderful comments yesterday!

It’s really just a little blip of an appearance on the screen. A re-emergence from retirement for a brief moment to be of service. But it was fun and unexpected. And most importantly, it was very moving to be in that room, sharing the scene with Jim and Ben, especially. Add in Bill Irwin and Sally Field and there’s the icing on the cake. By the way, Sally and Bill are incredibly kind and nice and funny. On their last day on the set, Bill stopped and told me how happy he was that we got to work together in that scene.

Anyway, on to the realities of this day: a heat advisory, an air quality advisory, and temperatures that will be well over 100 degrees when you add in the humidity. I’ve already been out to hand water all the plants, but of course, there’s only so much I can do. I’ll water again later in the day or early in the evening. We will be in this insane stretch of weather through the weekend.

This has been an awful summer – abnormally high temperatures that would be okay for a day or two, but, instead, stay here for two weeks at a time. Then a slight break, and they’re back again. My plants are suffering, the lawn is brown. It’s just dreadful.

Adding to that are my allergies which are particularly bad in this kind of weather.

Okay. Enough complaining. I have a lot of work to do. But brain fog is not helping me accomplish anything at the moment. All I want to do is sleep. I can see why siestas are so popular!

Stay safe.

Happy Thursday.