I see by the clock on the wall...

...that it's time to complain about the weather!

It's early summer, which means hot in the afternoon and windy/cool in the evening. Of course this is also Murphy's Land, which means the weather does whatever the hell it wants. All month it's been hot. Mid-nineties most days. Yesterday it scraped the bottom edge of three figures. Ol' Stalwart Joel is Stalwart, so that didn't bother him. But when evening came and there wasn't a breath of wind, it just stayed hot. Ol' Stalwart Joel was rinsing his head in cold water. The Secret Lair so hot and stuffy he was dripping sweat on the collar of his camo tuxedo.

Every summer there's an infestation of evening insects, and though this is my sixth summer here I don't believe they've repeated once so far. It's always something different. Last night I noticed these tiny little winged things, almost small enough to come in through the holes in the window screens.

And on the screens last night there were thousands of them. It was spooky. They wanted in bad. The wall next to my evening lamp gradually became coated with lucky applicants who'd found ways past the screens. A little after nine Ghost detected something that needed to be chased and barked at in the very worst way. He wouldn't shut up about it, Click was still outside, and I started getting concerned. Maybe there was something near the cabin that could eat Click. So I made the mistake of letting Ghost out to do his chase/bark thing. Every time I opened the door, it was as though somebody aimed a high-pressure bug hose at me and opened the valve wide. Click and Ghost and I (I never saw or heard anything, which is not unusual) finally came back in, but it was too late: The Lair was now thoroughly infested with these tiny and apparently harmless but very annoying things. Continued concentration on my book was now out of the question.

I figured I'd had enough fun for one night, so I turned off the lamp and went up to the loft, careful not to show any light that would attract the (now apparently zillions of) bugs. They mostly stayed downstairs, so that was good but the loft is more than eight feet off the floor and it was still hot. And it stayed hot, apparently till the wee hours. Broken sleep, and a night that lasts about a year. I've got a bunch of stuff to do this morning before it gets hot again, but all I want is to go back upstairs and back to bed.