matt

I know I haven't written anything really at all lately but I've been completely unmotivated to write. I've had things to say but no interesting slant to it so I've just opted to not write anything at all.

One thing I did want to comment on was the weather on my trip to Long Island this past weekend. The highs were in the 70's and the lows in 60s, maybe high 50's at some point. Look, I don't want to be that Floridian that complains when temps are below 80 but it felt darn cold being up there in that weather. I mean, it's July; it ought to be hotter than that and I think any northener will tell you that it is unseasonably cool. When we left, I was afraid of coming back on Sunday and missing the nice north east weather but the truth was it felt good being back in Florida where it felt like summer. Sure its nice not getting into a car that is a bazillion degees or sweating when you walk to get the mail, but I really don't mind the weather down here (apart from the hurricanes).

It's been raining a lot lately here and it's bothering me more so than usual. I think the issue was before last weekend, we had like a month of no rain at all so it made planning days very easy; put on shorts and short sleeves and don't even worry about anything else. Now I have to like check half a dozen weather sites to see what the consensus is about the possibility of rain. Of course, all this rain has stopped the local news media dead in their tracks with trying to scare us with wild fire stories. Speaking of which, the news media has totally dropped the swine flu thing, probably because nothing happened.

After work today I'm going to go for a walk through the house with our foreman (or is it, forelady?). I have no idea what I'm supposed to look for other than something painfully obviously wrong like a space ship that crashed through the ceiling (at least I think that would be a problem). I guess I'm just there to nod my head, look around and surmise that everything looks good. It's kind of like inviting someone who works at a gas station to go inspect the space shuttle prior to launch. I should show up with an exaggerated large magnifying glass, a note pad and every so often exclaim "ah-HA!".

Okay, it's official now. I hereby declare that summer has begun in Florida. We've had a string of days with 90+ degree highs and I think at this point any "cold front" would simply mean temps dropping to like a high of 80 something, so for all intents and purposes, it's summer. This means I will refer to Matt Summer Operating Procedures and that basically entails the following...

1. Thou shall embrace air conditioning wherever possible and take shelter in thy a/c
2. If thou should find thyself outside, thou shalt seek shade and refer back to procedure number 1
3. Thou shall limit all outdoor activity to before 11am and after 7pm
4. Thou shall blast air conditioning to ensure survival of thyself
5. Thou shall roll thy sleeves up to thy shoulders to create "dude sleeves"
6. Thou shall assume the "Superman position" when standing outside: legs spread apart, hands on hips and arms out to ensure the least possible contact between thy skin
7. Thou shall carry a small towel around to wipe away sweat when it develops in a futile attempt to control sweating
8. When all else fails, refer to procedure number 1

As I was driving home today, I was driving down I-4 with my windows down and it was one of those days where it's warm enough to wear shorts and short sleeves, have the windows down and not really NEED the air conditioning on. I also couldn't help but think that pretty darn soon, it's going to be the return of summer to Florida and that means obscenely hot temperatures once more and I cringed a bit.

What's great about the weather today is it's nice and warm, not too humid and at night/early morning, it's absolutely gorgeous (hell, you might need a sweater or coat if you're the sensitive type). But in about 2-4 weeks, it will start getting really hot and really humid and even at night it will be hot. The truth is you do get used to the temperatures and it doesn't bother me all that much, but the weather will affect what you want to do. In April, I'm up for just about anything, indoors or outdoors. But come June through September, it's going to be so uncomfortable outside that I'm not going to want to do anything outdoors between the hours of 11am and 7pm.

Before you shed any tears for me, I realize that I don't need a jacket between November and April for the most part and shorts have been the norm here since about Presidents Week. I'm just not excited about the prospect of summer 2009 coming my way but I'll learn to deal with it.....as in I'll deal with it at Typhoon Lagoon!

Another weekend has come and gone and I'm back to the grind of another work week. It finally heated up this weekend and yesterday was gorgeous. This week is supposed to be pretty hot, with highs in the 80's tomorrow and Wednesday. This is in sharp contrast to last week's weather where temperatures never got out of the 50's.

Last week I did some reading online about a sect of Judaism called Karaism, which is a bunch of Jews who reject the Jewish Oral Law. Basically, their motto is if God didn't say it, then it's not a law and I happen to find a lot of truth in that. Many traditions and rules are basically "man made". Some Rabbi hundreds of years ago decided these and it's become the rule, but my position is if God didn't say it, then why are we doing it? Classic example is during Passover when we are to not eat "leavened breads" (i.e. pasta, bread, etc). That makes perfect sense, but then there's rules that also say we can't have things like rice or potatoes and I think that's ridiculous. When the Jews were fleeing the Egyptians, they didn't know what a potato was or a number of other "new world foods". If it wasn't important enough for God to convey to Moses when the Torah was written, then we ought to not bother with it. Anyway, we'll see where this takes me.