it is hot and my eyes are tired. it could be my glasses getting dirty after a long day of working and reading. it was supposed to rain and cool off today, but it never rained. not sure it cooled off either. i am back. by my aircon where i'm comfortable and the itching in my eyes. has eased up a little.

when i go driving kids around i beg to take the prius instead of the much older honda. that's because there's a lot of waiting involved, and i'm too cheap to just run a gas engine to keep myself cool. i am not too cheap, however, to let the prius's battery cool me off. today we were like twenty five minutes at the hy-vee. these kids aren't trying to piss me off but they can make me wait twenty minutes without even thinking about it. so it wasn't so bad, i had the prius, it was cooling me off a little, and i was reading. but then the engine came on. the prius does that. if it can't run, or start, or go, on battery alone, it just starts its own engine and lets the engine recharge the battery. i consider it genius because we never have to charge yet we get like fifty miles a gallon, and lots of times it's really quiet.

at this moment though it rumbles beneath me and lets me know that twenty minutes of battery-power aircon is too much. unnatural.

when the fall comes i'll be grateful. it's my favorite season.

i fear losing my sight. having lost my hearing, i'm attached to using sight for phone calls and everything else. this computer, as i type, is dropping little periods. and i'm finding it hard to see them, which i have to. do in order to correct them. yeah i might come back tomorrow when i can see better. i worry that there io tomorrow that looks like that.

i have to write my books quick. while i can.

the house is way too quiet; the girls are gone. even the puppies know. we were all very attached to them.

i am not talk about this on social media, so i won't. i have a lot of feelings though, and send my love their way. puppies do too. for their part, they may even miss the puppies more than they miss us, as we are just among the grownups deciding their fate.

these days it's ninety-two/ninety-three days, way too hot for me. my strategy is simple - run around in the morning, and in the evenings, afternoons just sit here by the aircon and refuse to budge. enough is enough. even going in and out all the time when it's eighty-eight or so is hard on me. stay calm. restrict and combine trips. get it done early, then don't budge.

i'm doing a lot of reading. at the moment i have six books open. one is a rambling, modernist view of living in england with the present chapter focusing on whiskey. appropriate since, today, england has a huge football game (soccer) and may lose. our days have a lot of running around in them. i'm tired. don't want to leave this chair. the puppy finds my lap, and he doesn't want to either. he's lost his girls, and doesn't want to lose me.

i was going to my son's trailer, near knoxville, and took the interstate because it was faster. this put me near the knox county fair which is set up on that corner where the love's is. through the fence i got a sense of wha was. happening in there. a couple of nights ago i'd seen the trailers moving in to set up.

the carney's life is a hard life. there was a downpour last night, friday night, and really their whole show is friday night, saturday, saturday night, that's it. they're squeezing every penny out of people every minute. yet it's hot, mid-july, very intense sun, peak of summer. i don't envy them.

tomatoes are turning red, cucumbers are sprouting, in short, my garden is exploding and i'm happy about that. i'll eat it straight off the vine. i'm finding a little too much of this intense summer, even though it's barely ninety, is enough for me. i like being home by the aircon, curtains blocking out the intense sun. will send pics.

at the trailer, my daughter's booyfriend is patching drywall and doing other things to keep the raccoons at bay. could have been a mistake to tell them about the fair. they're young and easily led astray.

cleaned up bags and bags of garbage. sorry to say, the definition of disabled is, dad's gotta do it, that's the bottom line for me. if i'm gone he'll need an institution, or, maybe as an alternate theory, he'll learn it himself because he has to. things aren't looking good in that regard, though.

the trailer is long. the raccoons have been entering from below, and then climbing up into the ceiling through a hole in the center, where they can get up climbing near the hot water tank. that has to be sealed so they can't get up there. once in the ceiling they have babies make a racket. once one fell through - that's what the boyfriend is patching.

through this ordeal, though, some of the neighbors have come to know him better. he's not a bad kid, and he even mows their lawns sometimes.

it's been in the nineties, hot and steamy. my daughter says, as long as there's a pool we're ok, but i don't swim much anymore and not sure i'm ok. i have that kind of heat stroke that you get from going back and forth from an airconditioned car to the outside, hauling groceries or something, and you go back and forth one time too many. Your body gets readjustment fatigue.

so i came in and did my numbers, which in this case is blog visits, it being the first and all, and i put some of my complaints on that page, which is where i simply notice who's coming to blogs like this every month. last month, over twelve thousand came to this one, which is really quite remarkable, and remember i don't do much to commercialize it or lead people directly to my books. it's been around for a while. i keep it up. it's fully me. and no caps which is my way of saying, take your shoes off.

the puppies have to be separated. it's hard on both of them. my little one is locked up in here a lot.

somebody's booming firecrackers out there in the world. i don't care for it. i realize living in a world where you scrape for every dollar, gas goes up to five, and the big man walks off with a couple of billion in crypto leaves everyone with a lot of stress waiting to blow, might as well blow it on the nervous puppies who are strung out anyway already. i'm thinking, now that it's evening, might do some of these errands that need done while it's cool, but i'm still set back from the heat, the groceries, the going back and forth, and the stressed-out people.

would like to get some writing done, but this is the best i've got. hang in there.