Summer Hydration

No beach at this lake house!

Well, hello again!

I have been busy (and hot) lately. Too busy and/or hot to blog!

It is 10:30 PM on another steamy summer night. It is still 80 degrees (feels like 83) outside and I am content to be inside in my climate-controlled environment.

I suppose summers have always been hot. Perhaps it just seems that they are getting hotter!

As my aging body has become less tolerant of high temperatures, I am thankful for the cool central air which we enjoy. And I am thankful that we can afford the higher bills that the constant AC use generates.

Summer is a great time for water play, swimming pools and beaches. That is how we kept cool when I was young. Those things have lost their appeal for me.

But much of the past week was spent in various hydration activities. With that Great Lake handy, we have no water restrictions!

I hydrated my lawn. I hydrated the church flowers, adding some Miracle Gro to the hose water for the first time this year on Friday night. And I drank huge draughts--straight from the hose a few times.

I spent parts of two days on decks overlooking Lake Michigan (which is bursting with water this year, consuming the beaches and threatening to destroy the shoreline. See photo above). We were at a church dinner event for 40 and a book club event for 8.

One day on the deck was breezy and comfortable. The other became so hot that I couldn't wait to leave and get in a cool car.

We have not used our deck since May!

I mostly ventured out in the cool of the day, spacing out my physical activity--mowing the lawn incrementally and drinking deeply from our filtered tap water before and after.

It was also the week of my second (and perhaps last) colonoscopy. My last one would be at age 80.

Drinking a gallon of the lemon-lime flavored prep liquid and its consequences was pure torture! Almost 48 hours of a liquid-only diet itself was tolerable. But I had forgotten the agony of drinking a gallon of crap to promote other crap. And I threw up a little once.

Thankfully, I got a "clean" bill of health and am "good to go" for at least another 10 years!

July is ending. Fall will be here soon. Then I will begin to panic that I didn't get my summer work done.

And then ... the family will be here this year for CHRISTMAS!

But SNOW sounds amazing!