In Other News

I didn’t mean to be so grouchy in my previous post, but that is how I was feeling at the time. The Summer-Long Kitchen Project has really been frustrating, especially considering that I’ve been in renovation mode for almost ten months now. Hopefully the time of living with no kitchen is coming to an end (soon) and I can be done with home projects for a while.

August in North Carolina was hot. We had successive days of triple-digit temperatures and have been suffering a drought for quite a while. During the extreme heat, I noticed that the gas mileage on my Honda Element dipped to an all-time low of 16.7 MPG. Usually the vehicle gets between 22 and 24 MPG. I knew that a vehicle would get worse gas mileage under extreme conditions, but it was my eloquent engineer friend Nathan who said “hotter air is less dense by a linear factor, so you use higher throttle settings for the same output you’d have needed four months ago, but the stoichiometric ratio doesn’t change.” This combined with constant use of air conditioning would help drag us down to the sub-20 MPG club.

Also, the drought has been causing animals of all kinds to seek out other sources of food and water as their environs run dry. I have seen lots of deer on my property (usually, but not exclusively, at night) and found the dried skin shed by some snakes. Overall, I’d say that the brutal summer heat has been tough for everyone. Now into September, we are just starting to see relief. Ooohh, the mountains sound good right now! Time to plan a trip to Asheville. (Amy, I’m crashing on your couch! FYI.)

Until then, please join me in praying for rain!