Hypercharged weather continues in Ashlandia, where the pastries are gluten free and the coffee is organic and fair trade.

August 16, 2023 and Wednesday are here, for the records. If you’ve got an August bucket list, you might want to be applying yourself. Same with the summer BL. Summer’s end is rushing up like a horse coming to the Derby’s finish line.

It’s 89 with smoke here right now, 11:30 AM. I’m late getting started due to two matters. One, AC didn’t kick on last night. Lots of cursing about it, basic troubleshooting commenced, and a loose wire in the low-voltage sub system was discovered on the outside condenser unit. Reconnected and taped with electrical tape just for luck. Second matter was a plea for help from some friends for their Roku. It wasn’t running! One of my first questions was, did you change the remote’s batteries? They had. After we did a hard reboot on their system and were still getting nowhere, new batteries were installed. Voila.

Gonna be 102 F today, they tell us. Reached 102 or so at my house, on my system yesterday but the town only saw an official high of 99 F yesterday. Fortunately, yesterday’s cooldown was fast. Doors and windows were opened at 8 PM as the temperature drop commenced and fell into the low eights. Night took over and dropped us into the mid-seventies. Rain and thunderstorms are forecast for 7 PM this evening. We’ll see if they come, but they can be good, lowering the ground and air temp, but also could be dangerous, starting new fires with lightning. Fingers crossed about which way it goes.

Air quality is moderate due to smoke. Which fire is gifting us that? Don’t know. Might be a combo of all four — yes there’s a new one to the south, in the Klamath National Forest — as the heat dome has killed most breezes. Damn still air out there.

I’ve been reading more political news. One matter that disturbs me is how often Republicans say that they need to get rid of Democrats or liberals. Not win office over them; not work with them; get rid of them. Sad state when one half of the country basically professes to hate the other half. I don’t hear liberals/Democrats/Progressives talking about getting rid of the GOP. They talk about voting them out of office or maybe trying to discuss issues with them. Frankly, I am at a loss about their thinking many times, although I think it’s because they’ve sealed themselves in red wing information bubbles. Yes, red wing is deliberate; it’s beyond right wing, the home of the MAGAs. Like, we regularly check Red State to see what’s being reported over there. The skewing of news and information creates a harsh noise. Little of it aligns with what the rest of the world is thinking about. Like, Steve Bannon is already trying to blame Hawaii’s disaster on liberals, claiming that ‘actors’ kept people from fighting the fire or evacuating, etc., as these ‘actors’ started more fires. Evidence? Yes, just like his other claims, he has none.

It’s troubling, though. You can’t advance, you can’t be secure, you can’t grow as a society, nation, or civilization, if one half insists on spreading misinformation and fomenting distrust of the other. How are we to work together in such an environment? And that seems to be the red wing goal. To what end or purpose do they pursue such an agenda? It seems like, logically, it can only be for power. But then, much of what they do seems to defy the logic which the rest of us try to employ. Of course, from extensive polling and interviews in which we try to understand what they’re thinking, we’ve learned that the red wing supporters are mostly rural, dominated by men, and seem to feel victimized by by the rest of us and left behind. They blame ‘elites’, women, or racial minorities for their struggles as factories were moved to other nations.

Anyway, thanks to that, The Neurons have fired up Starship in the morning mental music stream (Trademark gifted). I’m hearing “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from 1987. The Neurons point out that it’s about building a world together. That’s what’s hoped and needed. Silly Neurons, they’re frequently squinting at the world through rose colored lenses.

And now we come to the coffee drinking segment of the blog. Make mine black, of course. Stay pos and be strong, my friends. Here we go, one more time.

But let’s listen to some music first. Cheers

Post script: here I go, in the WordPress autosave bug that keeps a post from being published. Can’t even click ‘Publish’. Seems to happen at least once a week for me. Only thing to do is copy it all to a new post. Just the things I need to open up my cranky side.