Hot Time in the Old Town

Well, it's late July in the Mississippi River Valley and it's hotter than hammer hell!
I don't care what anyone says--
it's the Heat and the Humidity!

Naturally, on a day like this I'm just where you'd expect to find me at lunchtime (which is around 6 p.m. for me)--sitting in the shade on a bamboo mat on the grass at the back of the store where I work, eating a ham on rye sandwich and sipping a raspberry tea from our competitor down the road.

I had not planned on being here tonight, in fact I was looking forward to resuming my usual a.m. grocery shift. However, since we're down 4 people again--2 hard workers, 1 new recruit, and 1 horse's patoot--and training 2 newbies, plus 1 of our regulars taking night classes at the local junior college, I was the only available for this shift. So much for well-laid plans; mine had to go on hold.

Once again, on my trip down for my tea tonight, I was amazed by the number of people who are seemingly incapable or overwhelmingly inconsiderate in navigating the traffic circle (otherwise known as a roundabout) between here and there.

Come on, folks, this is NOT brain surgery!

A traffic circle is supposed to make driving easier; NOT be yet another way of making you want to strangle the people who don't understand how they are supposed to work!

The general rules go this way:
1) A traffic circle is just like a blinking yellow light. Yield and proceed.
2) If there is no one at any of the other entrances, you may proceed, with caution, around the circle to your desired exit.
3) If another car / or cars have arrived before you, you all must take turns entering and exiting the circle in the order of your arrival.
4) At no time are you to disregard the yield signs at the entrances just because you the most selfish person on the face of the Earth!
5) Nor are you allowed to follow a string of cars from your entrance through the circle--UNLESS you are in a funeral procession or plan to be the BODY in the box in the NEXT funeral. Get the drift?!, you $%*!#@ dodo!!!

Simple rules, I think,
not even close to rocket science,
so please
try to get a clue,
learn how to drive
or take another route.

Now before you jump to the erroneous conclusion that I have succombed to the effects of the heat, I would like to assure you that I feel exactly the same way about the same set of bozos in the winter!

They are going out of their way, to make this a whole lot harder than it has to be, and they are in the way of people, like me who actually know how to drive, and grew up with a double-sized roundabout where you have to know how and when to merge into the inner circle and how to get out of it in less than one complete circuit unless you want to admire the colored lights in the foundation at the hub!

Like I said in the beginning, it's pretty darn hot in the Mississippi Valley, and just in case the humidity wasn't already knocking you to your knees, the weatherman just announced that they're tracking a new set of thunderstorms headed our way.

You gotta love it around here, because if there's one thing we have plenty of, it's weather, and if you don't like what we're having, stick around because it's been known to change seasons in the blink of an eye!

I spent six and a half years near Phoenix, and the whole time I lived there I passionately missed the green, green hills and valleys of home. Mentally I tried to accept life in the desert, but emotionally my heart and soul were embedded in the deep, black soil of my birthplace. I never realized how many shades of green there were until I moved away from them.

And oh, how I do love it here, hot, cold, humid as all get out and everything in between.
;-D