The Sound of Music

Chilly! What a nice word to use on the first day of August. The outside temperature is into the 50’s for the first time in quite awhile. And I was reading that our heat wave has now made it all of the way across the country and is now approaching New York. And this is what the New York Times had to say…

“…Virtually all climate experts agree that it is impossible to attribute any single weather event — a heat wave, drought or hurricane — to global warming given the myriad factors that influence weather. The most one can say is that, in a gradually warming world, heat waves are likely to become more intense, frequent and longer lasting.”

Isn’t that comforting? No one knows. And what I also found interesting was the fact that most of the heat wave records that were being broken recently had been set back in the 1930’s.

My hands are causing me some small amount of pain this morning. My day trip to Susanville had me nailing sheathing; something I hadn’t done in many years. And although I was slower than I used to be, the basic rhythms of nailing were still imprinted in my muscles. I was able to finger and roll the nails into position and keep up a fairly steady beat. Although I’m not sure why that makes me feel proud? I suppose it’s because I’m always happy to find that my aging hasn’t taken away all of my skills.

Yesterday, when I left Chico behind and climbed the hill towards Deer Creek, I lost the radio signal for KVMR and had to switch to CD’s for entertainment. I was driving the truck and I can play the “Big” CD’s that I have ripped, filled with close to 4 hours of MP3 music. I haven’t listened to a lot of these tunes for months now and so it was fun to hear them again.

I have most of my favorites recorded on these CD’s. One that caught my attention was Randy Newman, singing “Political Science”. This one seemed perfectly appropriate for today’s news. Randy Newman has always been one of my favorites and if you want to see more of his lyrics, you can click here. And speaking of politics; of course I had some Joan Baez songs. Joan and I are almost the same age and I like to think we grew up together, musically…and politically. Her soprano has to be one of the best ever heard. What a fantastic range!