"Gonna be a hot one."

I. The Weather

I don't need the weather app--sitting here on the front porch at 7 a.m. I can already feel it's going to be a hot one.
The texture of the air on my skin alerts me:
You'd better drink a lot of water today.

Sitting at the creek the other day, I had an entirely formulaic conversation about the weather (its changeability) with a passing stranger:

"They said it was going to rain," said the woman, gesturing at the dry sky, "so I took an umbrella..."

"Right", I said. "But if you hadn't taken an umbrella, then it would have rained."

"Yeah. And I'm wearing a sweater, but just a few days ago I had the air conditioner on."

"Wait a minute and we'll have snow."

Etcetera.
Minnesotans can go on like this for quite some time, since the weather here ranges from tornadoes to ice storms––"some of the widest variety of weather in the United States".
It's interesting to live with.

When I was sixteen, I spent the fall in Tucson, Arizona. I hated the weather: every single day was sunny and seventy.
I felt trapped in the same day.

Anyway, scripted conversations are normal in this low-density neighborhood, like I was saying the other day. 
On beautiful days, a slow and steady stream of people walk by the creek here;
but at the paths around the lakes in my old neighborhood it's a thick parade. Strangers there don't stop to comment on the obvious:
"Gonna be a hot one."

Commenting on the weather is a pleasant social exchange--like dogs sniffing each other's butts and noses?

II. The Wildlife

An unholy dog noise woke me up early this morning:
HouseMate had let the dog out and he'd interrupted a raccoon and her babies crossing the backyard.

HM ran out yelling at the dog to come back.
Luckily she caught him. The raccoon had gone on attack, naturally, and raccoons can tear dogs up.

The raccoons here are big and healthy--almost as big as HM's 30-pound dog. There's lots of garbage for them to eat, and fish from lakes, and few natural predators.
(Foxes live in the city, and sometimes coyotes travel along the river, only a couple miles away.)

With the warmer winters of recent years, opossums live here too now. I never saw one, growing up.

[I had to look up opossum--one P, two S's.
And its etymology:
"early 17th century: from Virginia Algonquian opassom, from op ‘white’ + assom ‘dog’"]

The weirdest animal I've seen in town are the wild turkeys that appeared last year. They're huge and ungainly-looking, and, unlike most wild creatures, they are not afraid to make eye contact with humans.

They look at you, but they do not connect with you:
"You are as a tree to me."
It's a turkey-centric world for turkeys.

Aaand... there you have it, the Weather and Wildlife Report today.

III. Books Sold

What else?
Let's see...

I'm going to the post office on the way to work to mail the third of the books I've sold on eBay (listed last week, when I also put the gold-hair doll up for sale, then soon took her down).

I'd paid cover price (!) for these new books and then didn't care for them. So I wanted to recoup a few bucks rather than donating them to the store or a Little Free Library,
. . . or selling them for a dollar to Half-Price Books––a rip off, but at least this brick-and-mortar bookseller is still in business, and a quick search doesn't turn up anything evil about them (unlike Amazon).

It's kind of fun to sell things on eBay, if you have the time.
These are the ones I've sold:

Fugitive Telemetry
(I was deeply disappointed in this, the sixth Murderbot book:
a formulaic mystery with a weak ending, it barely adds anything to the larger story world--it's as if author Martha Wells were fatigued.)

On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
(Ditto, disappointed--the author, Ocean Vuong, is a poet, but his metaphors get away from him here––I've already quoted raindrops peppering a scarf like typewriter strokes.)

Love in the Blitz
(Worse than disappointed--the letters of Eileen Alexander to her fiancé in WWII are so cloying, I couldn't finish them––a shame because the glimpses of life in London are good--someone should have edited these letters heavily. )

IV. The Pod Report

The boyette Pepito had sold on eBay right away, for $34, so I got a fraction of the hundreds I've spent on girlettes back.
In the past four years, I've probably bought thirty (or forty?) dolls at an average of . . . $15? (incl. shipping).
Not that I regret a penny of that! 

It started with Red Hair Girl, who I got for 49 cents when I was working at Goodwill.
Only two have ever come through my thrift store (99 cents each).

The most I've paid was $35, for a girlette who was looking desperately through the cellophane of her original packaging (from the 1990s).

Usually the toys are inactive when they're in packaging--I don't know why she'd woken up.
(It's like the premise of that movie about space travelers waking up from cryogenic sleep (or something) a lifetime too early. Passengers. It got terrible reviews so I didn't bother.)

This girlette (B84) was traumatized when she arrived and kept saying, "I was in a box".

She went to stay with the bears (on the bed) for healing, and after a few weeks she came out right.
Now she's totally blended in with the others.

I don't know how many girlettes I've bought, all told, because I've given lots of them away and can't remember to whom.* (I don't feel right about reselling them--Pepito was an exception.)

The pod here seems stable at around fourteen now.
__________________

*I'm always saying my memory is poorer than it used to be.
Can I remember which girlette went where?

Racer and Minnie Sutherland went to Sarah in London;
Valentina to a kid on the street;
Marina to Sister;
Sparkle & Bounce to Tracy;
Chrysanthemum to Kate;
Mir to Sara;
two to Kirsten; one to Crow;
Kiku, Bubble-Pop and [I forget] to Lisa in NYC;
one to a neighbor's grown niece named Madeline;
three to a customer and her two kids at the store;
Two to the kids next door to my house-sitting gig last summer;
a blondie to the daughter of a friend;
and Jayne is HouseMate's.

Ha. I guess I do remember things I care about.

Not sure that's everyone, but that's twenty-two.

(If you want one, let me know!)

Some have gone visiting and come back again.
Seven (that's her name) stayed with Jeff when he was sick, and various girlettes go and live with bink & Marz, but they usually rotate back in and out here.

(Spike went to the goat farm with Marz, but she's back here now, dressed as a space ballerina.)

Oh, and Bud Duquette stayed at the lake last summer, which made me sad, but I'm happy to think she's rocketing around with some kid who found her.

Finally, there's Red Hair Girl, who left on the bus a couple summers ago...
She walked up the Trans-Canadian highway, and we hear she's happy and well in the forests of Finland now.
I still miss her.