Getting Out of the Kitchen

Yes, it's been hot everywhere this summer...except in England where it continues to rain. My pal Jerome indicated that it was so hot at his house that the robins were using potholders to grab worms out of the ground. That's hot! A veritable flock of feathered creatures was sitting on the edge of our birdbath today, taking numbers and jostling each other just to get two minutes of splashing (and all the mosquito larvae they could eat!)...so you know it's hot. In fact, according to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, the United States just finished the hottest year on record...and records have been kept on such things since 1895! And while 170 heat-related records were tied or broken in the month of June, it was only the 14th hottest June on record, with the titleholder being that infamous June of 1933 when the Dust Bowl was in full force.

Of course, many people died in this country: some as a result of the heat itself, some from the power outages that resulted from the cool front that triggered violent storms and left thousands upon thousands without power. Naturally, we look to the experts for the reason for all of this nasty weather...and they opine that it has something to do with climate change: the earth is adjusting itself to compensate for all the crap we've put into the air, the water, and the ground. Various politicians will dispel that notion as pure sensationalism by environmentalists...smug in the knowledge that climate change is a possible cause, according to those who study such things; these folks also admit that other factors may be at play here.

Whatever the cause, one HAS to feel sorry for the poor robins