not again!

I'm surely not the only one to say today -- man, it's hot out there!

Loath that I am to live with the AC running, on days like this, I am so grateful for it! How incredibly lucky to live in a century old house with a terrific air cooling system! (Much of the credit goes to Ed, who reworked the duct system.) Still, I do not hate being outside, even with high humidity and temps pushing the mid nineties. So, breakfast on the porch:






(With such high humidity, the day appears misty and mild, with muted colors and fuzzy contours...)






And, too, I bike to my medical appointment (another check up -- of the yearly kind). My doc says -- I saw you on the schedule and I said to myself: my God, a year has passed already!
Glad to be a reminder of how age creeps up on you.

We then patter on about biking in hot weather -- as if, in our middle age (well, his middle and my older-middle) we need to pat ourselves on the back for belonging to the active set. But as I brag about biking from the farmette and he brags about biking up Old Sauk hill, he pauses and says -- I am sometimes passed by even older people who whiz by as if a hill was nothing, nothing at all for them.

An admission of our imperfections.


The ride from farm to city, then back again, is just lovely at this time of the year. There is the lake, of course.





And in the country stretch, there is the prairie, invading the strips along the path, filling them with graceful grasses and an assortment of the loveliest flowers.

This, too, is Wisconsin.






In the late afternoon, Ed and I finally get it together to head out to Paul's cafe. It's been nearly two months!
But before we go I say to Ed -- let me just pay my credit card bill. I'm fanatically meticulous about attending to this at the midpoint of each month.

I cannot get into my (online) account.
I try again. And again. Finally, I call customer service.
You're using the wrong login info, they tell me.
No I'm not. i KNOW my info on this account perfectly. (Indeed I do: I just changed all my logins when my identity was stolen in March. I keep good track of these things.)
You changed it all again recently -- the service rep tells me indulgently, as if I am just one of those teetering old people who got overwhelmed with too many security logins and passwords and can't keep it all straight anymore.
I haven't been to this account for ten days and back then, it worked perfectly!
I can almost sense his eye roll. My screen shows that you logged in just yesterday morning. At 6:45.

Damn. That wasn't me. My impersonator is at it again.

And so I spend the next hour reviewing all my accounts everywhere, changing passwords, securing my credit report, checking it all and oddly, oddly -- there is no tampering with anything, no use of my credit cards (yet), nothing except this one tiny detail -- the thief changed my login IDs. Ever so slightly, but s/he changed it. Why??

Someone out there is messin' with me!

Never mind, I'm on it! And besides, I have all these beautiful flowers to admire.






And to take care of. This heat is brutal. I spend a zen hour or two throwing water at them. Later, much later, when I come in to plate us some leftovers for supper, I can hardly remember what the issues of the day may have been. The flowers are holding their own. Life is good.