Too Much Sun

My blog posts were sparse this week. I think it was the heat. Tuesday and Wednesday topped ninety degrees. I spent much of Wednesday outside. In the morning I helped at New Roots Farm. All the other farm assistants are younger than me and they seemed less zapped by the intense sun. In the afternoon I walked dogs for two hours at the SPCA. For the first time the dogs seemed anxious to get back inside where it was air conditioned.

All my energy for creative writing was zapped by the sun as well as a series of online training courses that I am taking. These training modules were developed by a federal agency (that I will leave unnamed). The intent is to educate and inform on how to work with landowners within a framework of many, many federal laws. Instead the courses are making me listless and dumb. I usually don't like the word bureaucratic because politicians use it when they don't know what they are talking about. But these courses seem very bureaucratic and a bit removed from reality -- from the soil, air, water, plants, and animals that we are meant to better protect and manage by taking these courses.

Admittedly I am speed reading the course content, just so my brain doesn't fizzle completely. I have completed 3 out of 5 courses. Two more to go. Sometime during this Memorial Day weekend I will finish it off. Before that though we are heading north tomorrow for a day hike up Mt. Chocorua in the southern part of the White Mountains. This will be the first real hike for Kodi. He is in great shape and there is a stream along the way, which he will enjoy. Hiking up the trail, breathing in the wood air, soaking up the view from the top and I'll be ready to tackle whatever the remaining online courses throw at me. At least I can daydream about the hike, while I speed read my way to the end of the course.