Observant readers will have noticed that this blog did not appear on schedule Monday afternoon. Several things conspired to prevent this, but first, I wanted to mention that I’ll be moving my regular blog day to Tuesday from now on. Getting up and running on a Monday morning can be a challenge, so I wanted to make it easier to get this done every week.

I’d also like to remind folks, if you haven’t done so already, to please subscribe to my blog. It only takes a minute, there’s a handy link on the side of the page to make it easy, and from rumors I’m hearing, Facebook is about to have a ton of alt-right connections made public, so let’s avoid the rush, shall we? You plug in your email, and every time I put up a new post, you get an email notice that it has happened including a handy-dandy link to take you there, and all free of charge! This will happen regardless of whether Facebook – or other social media sites – are feeling generous enough to let my posts linking to this week’s blog be seen by more people than just me. There is NO selling your email address to unscrupulous rug salesmen involved. No fuss, no muss. You can throw the email away as soon as you get it, and no one will be the wiser. Or will they?…

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Our condo association had scheduled some routine maintenance for this week – repaving part of the shared driveway – and the small apron of same that leads up to each unit’s single-car garage – with fresh blacktop. This year, the part they worked on was right outside my office window. They’re done now, but for four days it was loud, dusty, and, finally, filled with intense heat and the piquant bouquet of petrochemicals. All that – plus being in a south-facing room means I get full sun for most of the day, but couldn’t open the windows for any relief. This is fine for my houseplants, but since several of those plants are potentially toxic to the kitties, the door stays closed at all times, trapping the heat inside. My office became a furnace, and it wasn’t hot enough outside this week for the air conditioning to kick in, just to add insult to injury. The combined negatives made doing much of anything in my office unpleasant, so I punted until now.

I was going to expound this week on the lack of positive qualities of leadership (or the lack of a positive number of brain cells) in the United States, but it seems far too likely that everyone who reads my blog has seen, heard, and read too much of that sort of thing already, and you’re probably all sick to death of it. My fallback plan was an essay on the virtues of Fireball and Coke, but that’s perhaps also a bit too on-point for many of us right now. Instead, next week I’ll bring the first of several travelogues, recapping the zany adventures of Bill and Tracy in foreign lands from previous years. Since we can’t travel overseas ourselves right now, living vicariously might be a fun escape from the horrors of everyday living.

Until next week… cheers!