It's August, and while it's my birth month, it's also one of the hottest months of the year. When the monsoonal flow shifts far enough from Arizona, it's also one of the most humid months of the year. I am soooo not a summer person, so you can imagine how much I hate summer. The only thing worse than the hot sultry days of summer are summer in January days.
It's not all bad. The Dodgers and Angels are fighting the Giants and A's for their respective National and American League divisions, and are both currently leading, but not by much. School is about to start, which means that college football is about to get underway. Go Trojans! Go Bruins!
I checked out the Wikipedia article about dog days. Evidently the term goes back to Greco-Roman times and the preoccupation with Sirius the Dog Star. It was the brightest star, and rose just before the sun, leading the ancients to associate Sirius with the hottest days of the year. Romans even sacrificed red dogs in April in an attempt to appease the gods and keep the summer temperatures down. Good luck with that.
One thing I always liked about summer was that it is also vacation time. I've done a lot of traveling in the summer. Growing up, we spent every other summer traveling to Missouri and Minnesota to visit Mom and Dad's families. Because of the triangular nature of the route, we went by different roads coming and going. As a result, we saw much of the country west of the Mississippi River before I graduated high school. From the major parks like Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore to the small oddities on Old Route 66, we experienced a great deal of this great country in various station wagons. Sometimes we stayed in motels, but as the family grew--given that there were five of us kids squeezed into the car--we used tents and sleeping bags. I was twelve or thirteen when we got that tent, and it got a lot more use in the alternate summers when we camped out at the beaches and the California parks.
In Missouri we usually stayed with Grandma and Grandpa Passley in Alba. In Minnesota we generally stayed at the family farm outside Brainerd. We were able to visit around the family in both places, and in Minnesota there were often school and/or family reunions, which drew the family from across the country. I've seen some of the cousins as adults in more recent years. We definitely have changed over the years!
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