Another week gone by...

...and we're nearly at the end of August. Ouch. How did that happen?

The air-conditioning guys are gone, gone, gone. No more hammering, no more power tools. Just cool and quiet air coming through the vents.  The new system for the second and third floors must be all-powerful and most efficient because the thermostat is set on 77 degrees---- any lower and both my husband and I are freezing.  I guess the thermostat wars are history as well, even though I have figured out how to work the new digital glow-in-the-dark thermostat that's hanging up in the hallway.  All you see at night is this little neon green glow coming from the thermostat box, like a magical portal into NeverNever Land.

Our young Miss C was here for two days this week, along with her friend C.  They stayed in the guest rooms over the barn, with various scorpions and bees for company.  The wet Spring weather we had a few months ago was a population boom to everything crawling and flying.  Not to mention the fact that the entire state of Texas was established on top of the largest ant colony on this planet.  Miss C told us that they found dead scorpions and slow-moving honey bees up in the barn rooms.  No matter how much we spray, and no matter how tight-as-a-drum sealed you think everything is, these little creepy crawly creatures manage to find their way inside. Life in the country. The insect world is just never-ending.  Hard to believe I don't get totally nuts over scorpions anymore... I just whack them with a shoe (without my foot inside of it) and then scoop them up with a little dustpan.  When we first moved here, I would run out of the room and scream for my husband.

Miss C has an extremely high tolerance for bugs.  I watched her walking around the side yard yesterday and she stopped to pick up a huge black cricket that was in the grass.  She put her finger down in front of the cricket, it crawled up on her finger and just hung on there while she talked to it and tried to convince me to come down from the porch for a closer look.  Not a chance, said I.  "But this one could be Jiminey Cricket!" she told me.  If he's not wearing a top hat and coat and carrying a cane, then it's just a plain old cricket!  (Needless to say, it was just a plain old cricket, and I stayed on the porch.)

We're trying to get in touch with the carpenters who did the work on the third floor.... we need them to come back now to put on the finishing touches up there, now that the new air-conditioning system has been installed.  Of course, now that we would like the carpenters here, they are  nowhere to be found.  How does an entire crew just disappear? And where do they go?  Away to the cooler north for the hottest part of the Texas summer?  We keep calling.......... no answer........... no call-backs.  When all of this work started, I made a joke that we'd be lucky to have the third floor turned into a library by Christmas-time.  By the looks of it now, I may not be too far off.  It's the Texas way:  If it doesn't get done today, then it will get done tomorrow. Unless it's too hot. Or unless it's raining too hard. Or unless the fish are biting.

My pile of books that are waiting to be read seems to have grown quite a bit here.  I wasn't reading very much while the air-conditioning work was going on--- too much noise, too many interruptions from the back door slamming and dirty footprints going back and forth across my kitchen floor.  So now I've got to get serious about this pile of books.... everything from a biography of King George VI to a vintage copy of  Alice in Wonderland.  And there's a few copies of Michener's books waiting for me, as well as a copy of No Ordinary Time (a book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt).  Two books that were on that pile have already been rejected this morning... a memoir called "Father Joe" and "Look Homeward, Angel."  One of them just got listed on eBay, the other is in the give-away basket for our parties.  Someone else will rescue them, and that's two books that will never see the shelves of our third floor library. (If it ever becomes a library.)   I expect to have better luck with King George VI and the Roosevelts.