Dog breath weather

The hot, steamy, humid days of summer are upon us, and as such, our family refers to days like these as "dog breath weather". If you've ever had a dog and been around them when they are panting, you know that it's very warm and moist air that comes out of their mouths, thus, the term "dog breath days". It's enough to make you want to run scrambling for anyplace air conditioned. My new apartment, located on the second and third floors of a 112 year old house, can get mighty warm on these kinds of days. I have window AC units in the living room and bedroom, but nothing in the attic except a 20" box fan, hardly enough to cool down such a wiltingly hot space. It's really hard to be up there right now for any length of time, but I am also in the process of unpacking crates of books and shelving them up there where most of my bookcases are located. It's very hard to do this for more than a few moments at a time on these 90+ degree days. Right now, I have two more crates to unpack from the latest batch that my brother brought over recently. I am finding it increasingly hard to motivate myself to get to the task, but I really must, because I am storing them in the vacant downstairs apartment, which is most handy to have as extra space for storage and staging. I have no idea if or when someone might move in down there, but my suspicion would be probably sometime around August 1st, although, to the best of my knowledge, it has not yet been shown to anyone and frankly, I'd be shocked if someone took it sight unseen. It's a nice space and all, a bit smaller than I would want if I were still apartment hunting, but it would be a nice place for, say, a graduate student or someone like that to rent out for a year or two. This house is rough, needs much work, and could most certainly benefit from local management, which, I come to find out, it once did, but apparently that is no longer the case and the landlord here lives 2000 miles away in Arizona and has nobody local here to affect repairs when needed, which is what drove the downstairs tenant to abandon his place and move out.

So for the time being, I am taking advantage of the extra space to stage and store things that are still coming over piecemeal. The more of my books arrive and are shelved where they used to be, the more at home I am beginning to feel. It also came as a real shock when I packed up my old place just how much stuff I had and it was really liberating to get rid of so many old books, clothes and other miscellaneous stuff that was cluttering my house. I am still a bit amazed at how many books I still have and I suspect that some of them will still need to stay in crates for lack of space to shelve them, so I may yet do more downsizing depending on time and energy and how hot the attic is. Books are a hard thing to get rid of, but when I was weeding before the move, I asked myself, well, is there any likelihood that I will read this book anytime soon? If the answer was, no, then it went into one pile, and if the answer was, well, maybe or yes, it went into another pile. Paperbacks were largely gotten rid of due to my aging eyes that find those too hard to read anymore, and the fact that many of them had badly yellowed over the years anyway, so it was not a difficult thing to part ways with books that are slowly disintegrating. There are books I bought years ago and have never read but decided to keep because they might get read someday and look good enough to where I may well go ahead and read them. I am reading one such book now that had sat in my collection for a long stretch of time unread, "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. A former co-worker who retired some years ago gave me his entire collection of Lincoln memorabilia, VHS tapes, books and other things, which I gratefully accepted, being a lifelong fan of Lincoln. I've been reading "Team of Rivals" off and on since November, when the Stephen Spielberg film "Lincoln" was released. I was briefly interrupted by another book that seemed interesting and it was because it dealt with both history and archaeology, two strong interests of mine. Once finished, I returned to "Team of Rivals" and plan to make it a good long read. It may take me well into the fall months before I am done reading it and as I shelve my Civil War book collection, I am finding other books that I bought recently that may get picked up and read, in particular, "With Malice Toward None" by Stephen Oates, another great Lincoln biography. I just bought a good used copy at a local bookstore here even though I really don't need anymore Civil War books, but it was in great shape and cheap, so......I could not say no. I've read other biographies by Oates, namely those about John Brown ("To Purge This Land With Blood") and Clara Barton ("A Woman of Valor") and they were really well written, so when I spotted this Lincoln book in our local bookseller, well.......no way that I can say "no" to any good biography by Stephen Oates. And anyway, I wanted to make a purchase in order to support a local independent bookseller and help keep his doors open. So more books await unpacking and shelving, but with this dog breath weather we are having, it's going to be tough spending any amount of time in that stuffy and hot attic. I may have to wait until things cool down just a bit. Hopefully this heat wave won't last too long.