Saturday August 12th 2023

I haven’t heard the official reports, but today seemed to be the warmest of the summer. At one point this afternoon my phone weather app was reporting the temperature as 99 for this area. My car thought it was 102. Let’s just say it was hot. Contributing to the warm conditions was a lack of wind. Until late in the day there was next to no wind away from the coast. These conditions and the duration are not normal for this area.

I drove out to Cedar Point Preserve today. There were about twelve empty boat trailers at the boat launch. A combination of fishing and recreational boats get launched from the location. The only boat I saw was a personal watercraft (i.e. a jet ski). Hiking wasn’t a real option because of the heat and the sights were rather static. There weren’t any birds around and once the boat motored away there weren’t any people to watch either. The wind along the open marsh area leading to the sea was just strong enough to keep conditions tolerable as long as I remained in the shade. I hung around looking for something interesting for about half an hour.

The second and main thing on today’s agenda was a stop at Walmart for groceries. Saturday afternoon isn’t the best time to go, but I’d been putting it off long enough that it really had to be today. It was very busy. There were a lot of families in the store. The main characteristic of a shopping family is one person focused on shopping and many other disinterested people hanging around them clogging up the aisles. Another indicator of how busy it was could be seen at the checkouts. In addition to all the self serve checkouts they also had most of the staffed checkouts open.

I took my time completing my shopping. For some reason I wasn’t very organized today. There were several times that I had to back track to aisles that I had already been down. I also ventured into the non grocery part of the store. Walmart usually puts the pharmacy and associated products on the other side of the store from the groceries. To get a tube of toothpaste it is necessary to venture across the whole store. Crossing through the clothes, electronics and hardware departments slowed me down with looking, but not with purchasing.