So I thought I’d forgotten to shift the PM to AM when I scheduled the publication of todays exciting adventure. Nope. The computer nicely says it missed the publication, but doesn’t tell me why. Grrrrrrrrr

Weather in the Tries: Wowsa!! A whole week coming up with no triple digit days in sight! Alas, a week of 90+ but they ain’t gonna be triple digit days!!! We takes our cool where we can find it, yes?

For you folks in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, &c, you have my most sincere sympathies. Maybe get the whitest white paint made and paint your homes? It might help. Use color in the trim if you need color.

Read the other day where if we were able to stop Climate Change now, we will not cool down in our lifetimes or anytime soon, but we can stop the heat climb. If we want to. In other words, if we stop it right now, this is gonna be as good as it gets. And if we don’t stop it, it’s just gonna get hotter. That’s the crux of the problem, eh? We don’t really want to. We want others to do it, but don’t want to take responsibility ourselves because we’re too good, too rich, too obnoxious?! The countries who contribute the least to the Change, suffer the most. Island nations in Southeast are already under water. Bangladesh, is learning how to grow food on floating gardens. Countries with low-lying coastal areas are already losing ground. When I lived in Florida, my house was built on top of a hill with a 27-foot elevation. I think I’d have been okay as long as I had a boat and could out-paddle the resident ‘gators. 

And the higher the temps, the smaller the food crops and production. Coral is already bleaching in Florida, when the coral dies, the reef will die, the fish will migrate toward more habitable waters. Sharks will follow, and when they can’t find enough fish, they’ll go for people. ‘Gators will go for dogs, cats, people, whatever they can catch, kill, and eat. And don’t get me started on my beloved salmon and bears! 

And check out this magazine. Hakai. It’s free.

It’s kind of nice having a housemate who is a progressive. Slowly, we are cutting down on our use of plastics. I am back to using bar soap, and bar shampoo, and when my conditioner is gone, I’ll use bar conditioner. I wish someone would come up with a solid dish soap. Wait, what did I say? I asked the Duck(DuckGo) and I’ll be hornswaggled, The Earthling Co., has a solid dish soap. Non-toxic ingredients. 

Housemate is much better than I in one aspect, he buys ALL his books as electronic ones. I’m still on my paper books for nonfiction and poetry, and if the electronic version of fiction is more than $4.99, I’ll buy a used paper copy for less. I think Amazon &c should be honest, we are only renting books from them, not actually buying the electronic ones. We can’t loan them to friends, although some we can loan ONCE to one person. We can’t give them to our children when we die, unless they want to keep our accounts open. A lot of people check electronic books out from their libraries, but publishers are fighting that, too. They are cutting down on the affordable number of licenses libraries can buy.

Are the authors getting higher royalties when their books are electronic? No. Does it cost the publisher more money? No. In fact, they get more, because once the book is formatted, it’s done. It’s uploaded and forgotten, except the spreadsheet that comes however often from the seller. And they go bwahahahahaha all the way to the bank.

Also, trees are a renewable resource. In fact, we have some planted “forests” (orchards?) not too far from us where some kind of trees are planted and harvested by machine. I believe they are trees for paper. And I think it takes 4 years from plant the trees to harvest. Still, I try to use less paper. I’m afraid I’m failing. I also really like the feel and smell of books. Those tries might be for fence posts with the leftovers going to paper. It’s all used, somehow.

I watched the ducks the other day, when it was really, really hot (triple digit hot) and kinda wished I was a duck, and could go swimming and dabbling in the pond, and then I remembered what all is in that pond and decided a cool shower would make a whole lotta more better sense

So, DuhSantis is strangling the educational system in Florida, Abbot in Texas, and probably all the southern red states will follow suit, as well as a few of the northern ones. What will happen to the kids? Will they have to go to Prager U or Tammy Fey U in order to get a college education? I mean, seriously, do you think Hahvahd will take any of those kids? Or any of the other ivy league schools? And when they graduate and go hunting for jobs??? And those grand old southern schools of higher learning? What’s going to happen to them when-out-of-staters no longer want to apply? Sure, The Crimson Tide is a great football school, and so far a pretty good U. Will Southern Universities start giving local boys from the South preferred acceptance? Will that affect their good standing? Their income? Will they ever recover?

If you have any children in Florida or anywhere else where books are being censored, please, mail them some age-appropriate real books. Or send them an eReader and buy them some real books. Consider
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexei, 
We Had Our Reasons–Poems by Ricardo Ruiz and Other Hard-Working Mexicans from Eastern Washington, 
Wizard of the Pigeons a novel by Meghan Lindholm, and 
Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson. 
Read these books first, so you can discuss them with your far away child. Don’t forget books by Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Dee Brown, Vine Deloria, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Kathleen Alcala, Isabel Allende, and so many others. Give them a well-rounded reading. 

I have left LGBTQ+ category of books off, because I haven’t read that many—and that’s not to say there aren’t Two-Spirit authors mentioned above. I don’t know, nor do I care. I’ve read some LGBTQ+ books, and thoroughly enjoyed them. The best I’ve read lately is This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed. I laughed, I cried, and I recommended it to all my friends, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community. It’s a great book to show that odd as it seems, they’re just people, too. Oh, yeah, I cheered by the time I got to the end.

If my book suggestions don’t tickle your interest, check with your local librarians, they are the keepers of all knowledge 😉 And they love nothing more than to share that knowledge with readers.

Okay, your assignment, should you choose to accept, is to see that short people you know in book-censored states have access to good books to give them a more or less well-rounded look at the world in which they will live. This blog will not self-destruct in five seconds.

Sammy doesn’t understand the last paragraph. What can I say? He’s a dog. But he’s much happier with new, lower temperatures. It’s still too warm for him to snuggle all night long, but I often feel a little paw touching me somewhere. He sends pupkisses. As long as they come a while after he’s eaten, they are pretty nice to get. We all wish you a fantastical week!

Speaking of books, I have two more reviews posted at Rainy Day Reads.