August is coming, and it’s a dull month in terms of holidays, but not so for activity. Folks start to come back from vacation, the college campuses start to fill up (some primary and high schools even start early), trees start to turn duller shades of green and the realities of regular life begin to sink in.
Summer will be over soon, but for some of us nothing has changed.
Police and fire squads, medical staff, stores and restaurants, and even the lifeguards at the shore where you’ve been on vacation, have all been hard at work. Vacations in the summer mean that fewer persons are on staff everyplace. Of course, then we all come home and spread the first colds of the season around, and we still have staff shortages everywhere. The difference is that everybody is home from vacation so spots may still get filled when somebody is out sick.
Caregivers and private services still operate all summer long. Nobody fills in for them.
Once Labor Day weekend comes, those same staffers who have had little to no time off will be preparing for grouchy people who return from summer vacation and find they need stuff, and nobody wants to wait for it.
Maybe the problem is that we’ve all gone 20 years or more without being reminded, as in kindergarten, to wait our turn.
Traffic will change from being overcrowded to being over-impatient. The good movies will come out in time for Oscar® night in 2020, and new television series will start, with new seasons of old favorites coming back.
I live for September when Jeopardy returns.
Clothing will also start to change over to decent coverage. Every year I am amazed at some of the hootchie momma outfits I’ve seen in public places, not the mention the workplace. Once we start cooling down, people start covering up.
But I’m ahead of myself: we’re talking August and the dog days of summer.
Funny that phrase, because dogs hate the extreme heat. In July we had a few heat waves, which are defined by three or more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees. Otherwise known as a scorcher.
Every year I get the urge to crack an egg onto the pavement to see if it will cook. We just had a 100 degree day, and it was too darned hot to go out to try to cook an egg on the pavement. It probably would’ve exploded had I put it on the car’s roof.
August was named after Augustus, who was the adopted son of Julius Caesar and turned the hot mess that was the infamous assassination of his adopt-a-pop into a campaign that strengthened the Roman Empire.
They also vacationed on the sand, I’m sure, but didn’t have to come back by September.
So on we go further into the back half of another odd year–and I mean that both ways–wondering what lies ahead. I’m sure that normalcy will come once Labor Day is ended, for then we’ll be finished with that holiday-less month, and back to taking another day off. Except for the firefighters, doctors, police, firemen. . . .
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