Ah, Summer

I remember from my working days that things quieted down significantly on Fridays during the summer. Some people didn't come to work at all; most showed up, but moved at a leisurely pace and spent more time catching up than making forward progress. It was a good day for a long lunch or, if you were feeling virtuous, for cleaning up your office. Evidently, that trend has continued and accelerated, if such an active word may be used for such a languid phenomenon. I've noticed that email now slows to a crawl by late Thursday afternoon and on Fridays behaves pretty much like raindrops in the desert, which is to say it spatters occasionally and mostly ceases to occur. Interestingly, my website gets lots of hits on Friday afternoons - is that one of the things people are up to while they're not emailing?

In an unrelated summer observation, it turns out that 100 degrees in the desert feels cooler than 80 degrees in the midwest. Seems impossible, but we personally experienced it yesterday, having spent the morning in Chicago and the afternoon in Nevada. Maybe reasonable people can differ on this (perception being, after all, totally subjective), but during an admittedly gorgeous week in Chicago we retained at all times a certain dampness that promptly evaporated the minute we got off the plane in Las Vegas. And, as my resident Mr. Science tells me at least twice a week, evaporation is a cooling process.