Another Week: Number 137

Life presents obstacles. We try to find workarounds.

Our local atmosphere now alternates between a stifling dew point and unhealthy smoke, so I have air conditioning for the humidity and an air purifier for the pollution.

Since this is possibly our new normal, I will reconcile myself to spending more of my remaining life in the house, and I will be grateful for household chores that send me up and down the stairs all day — preventing me from developing “bungalow legs.”

In my house, in lieu of in-person experiences, I have a TV. It has long been my habit to monitor various news outlets to get an idea of what’s going on in the world, but lately I need to limit news coverage to small doses. Monday night’s installment of The Rachel Maddow Show was so upsetting that I turned it off after 18 minutes because my mind was starting to plan a jump from a bridge.

In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, one of my favorite authors — Tom Robbins, who died this past February — summarized the news with the refrain, “The international situation was desperate as usual.”

Well, our domestic situation has now gone far beyond the usual. I’m thinking we’re pretty fucked.

Thank God for sports, which allow conflict to play out harmlessly in a protected space, governed by whimsical and minute rules. Rather than contemplating why we are letting a raving lunatic run our country and a demented weirdo destroy our greatest medical achievements, I can enjoy Sophie Cunningham launching three-pointers against her former team.

But by the end of Thursday night’s game, the Indiana Fever had lost both Sydney Colson and Aari McDonald to injuries for the rest of the season. This leaves the Fever without a point guard until Caitlin Clark returns from her injury. I’m not sure what a “point guard” even is, but I remember that Michael Jordan was a point guard, and most teams have one.

Meanwhile, green dildoes are being randomly tossed onto WNBA courts as a meme coin promotion.

In other sports, the Chicago Cubs have started slipping down a slippery slope.

Now and then, I do get out of the house a little. There’s a shady spot in my backyard that — with any breeze — remains surprisingly comfortable on hot days. I like to read there in Amy‘s lounge chair.

The hummingbird has been visiting multiple times a day, sipping either at my feeder or the two Wendy’s Wish salvias. She buzzes me while I water in the morning, or eat an apple at noon. Then on Wednesday, I noticed that “the” hummingbird is now two hummingbirds. Hummers are zealously territorial, so most sipping is now surreptitious — until the second girl zooms in like a fighting dart to chase the first one out of my yard.

This competition signals that summer is winding down. The tiny birds will gradually load up on calories while they wait for a storm system a few days into September, then they’ll catch the back end of it for a counter-clockwise push toward Mexico.

Also winding down is the construction on Mitchell School across from my house. On Tuesday, the chain-link fencing perimeter around the site magically disappeared, permitting neighborhood moms and kids to bicycle the fresh concrete driveway that has replaced the previous lawn. Fourteen or fifteen months of noise and dust is coming to an end, and it’s a relief.

On Saturday evening, storms started rolling into our area from the southwest, and they had a certain blistery, herpes-like appearance on the radar map.

Leaving my mom’s apartment in Pleasant Prairie to head home, I saw few small raindrops appearing on my windshield. Five minutes later, it was raining in earnest as I turned north on Highway 31.

After that, the rainfall increased moment to moment. I moved to the center lane to avoid hydroplaning in the outer ones. I switched my windshield wipers from normal, to fast, to nutty — but they still couldn’t handle the downpour. Near Petrifying Springs, the deluge was so strong that the white lines went wavy and I was basically Luke Skywalker, using “the Force” and muscle memory to guide me home.

Parked there, I sloshed across my sidewalk and into the house. But our rain total here for the event was jut 1.16 inches — which was about perfect following a brief dry spell.

North of here in the Milwaukee suburbs, some communities got up to 14 inches of rain. The floods forced the Wisconsin State Fair to close early Saturday night and stay closed on Sunday. Streets turned into rivers, and motorists were rescued from submerged cars.

It’s been quite a summer. We have endured oppressive heat and humidity, been choked with wildfire smoke — and now we get a taste of the sudden, torrential rainfall that has been pummeling localities all over the world. If climate change is a hoax, someone has certainly gone to a lot of trouble.

I walked three miles this week.

Petrifying Springs redesign

On Friday afternoon, I took my first walk in 19 days at Petrifying Springs, and it’s hard to accept all the redesigning that has been going on there in recent years.

When I was growing up, the park always felt like a nature refuge. Obviously, its roads and bridges and swing sets were manmade, and its landscape was curated — but it used to be where neighborhood kids met “the woods.”

Now, people are becoming more distant from nature, the woods have been thinned, and you can see and hear the cars whizzing by on Highway 31. Dirt paths have been improved and lined with neat rows of daffodils, signs have been posted everywhere advertising the park and golf course amenities and events, and a fenced-in dog park and Biergarten have been added, so Kenoshans finally have a place where they can drink beer and blast music.

Additionally, the Pike River is getting revamped. They call it a “restoration,” but the river was never previously lined with banks of neat white rocks out of some Disney cartoon.

What had become a natural mess is now being remade as a manicured commercial campus that hosts more bikers than Boy Scouts or birdwatchers.