Hot again today

 * Had to put the thermostat up to 80 because I was worried about both my bill, and the air conditioner overworking. It's fairly miserable in the living room, which is on the west side of the house and takes the worst of the late-day sun. I have a small oscillating fan blowing on me but it only helps a little.

I did just now step it down to 78 - the sun's gone down so hopefully overworking the AC will be less of an issue - but I really do not sleep when it's warmer than about 75 F. 

This is going to be a MISERABLE summer, I fear. 

* For a lot of reasons. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what exactly the Chevron decision will mean for a lot of the environmental legislation I teach. On the one hand: the big Acts did come in before Chevron deference was a thing (it's only been around for about 40 years, so the mid-80s) but on the other hand I could see motivated politicians wanting to dismantle some things, even things like food-safety regulations, which would backfire and become very unpopular to have been undone when people's kids start getting massively sick ("Don't MAKE me pull out the 'Elixir Sulfanilimide Tragedy' and have to tell you about it")

But it does seem like there's a lot of chaos and churn and there's been a fair amount of chaos in my personal life of late, and chaos upsets me.

* The tree guys are supposed to come tomorrow so I have to set an alarm so I'm sure to be up and dressed and fed by 7 am. I won't be surprised if I get a text they're not coming, though, given how hot it's supposed to be. It's not URGENT urgent, but I want the tree gone before we get storms and wind this fall; I don't want a repeat of what happened in May. 

* I bailed on reading "Dracula" again. I guess I find it upsetting and depressing - I'm drawing in (once again) to the part where Lucy meets her fate and I remember feeling a revulsion when I read it last time (and oddly, in high school, I don't remember feeling that - but again, I have a suspicion that kids and teens, by virtue of having been less battered by life are more resilient and less-affected by such things.  (well, kids and teens who were like me, and lived in a functional family, and didn't experience a lot of deaths early on, and didn't have major medical issues). But the book gives me a very claustrophobic feeling, like there's this doom that you can't avoid seeing, and there's nothing anyone can do to prevent it (even though the evil can eventually be stopped, Lucy winds up as a bystander who pays the ultimate price)

I picked up another book - and yes, a murder mystery, but somehow these seem lighter to me, because the perpetrator is not some kind of unholy supernatural evil, but rather a human who gave in to their worst impulses. It's an author I'd never heard of, and it's apparently only recently been reprinted - Mavis Doriel Hay's "Death on the Cherwell." It's fundamentally a school story - the equivalent of first-year college students at one of the women's colleges (a fictional one) that's part of Oxford discover the much-disliked Bursar dead in a canoe. And that's about all the farther I am. But part of the reason this is less claustrophobic than Dracula is the young women - presumably about 18 or 19, but I suspect, in the 1930s 18 and 19 year olds were younger in some ways than they are now (but perhaps more mature in others). And the school setting is familiar - perhaps it's a bit more like my old prep school than the college I teach at now, but it's still familiar. (And one of my favorite books read in the past few years? Was "Gaudy Night," which is in a similar setting)

* I'm also distressed by some of the local news; there was a shooting (no suspect identified, so possibly a random attack) at a moble-home park in the next town over (so: about 10 miles away) and a couple of horrific drunk-driving accidents, including one where a young man (not the drunk driver) was killed when he was trying to rescue a small child from ANOTHER wreck. And it's just sad and difficult.

And I think the heat makes people more testy and prone to quarrel. A colleague and their grad student were arguing loudly and for quite a while today; I don't know about what. I left for lunch and then just opted not to go back in the afternoon. 

I can't go in tomorrow until I'm sure the tree guys are coming and have started, and also , I need to get to the grocery at some point either tomorrow or Wednesday. (Tomorrow would be better; the day right before a holiday tends to be BAD).

* I am doing a bit of knitting, I'm close to done with the first of a pair of sportweight socks; this is out of a yarn colorway called "clumsy cat" though it reminds me maybe more of #2 pencils? That pink is a lot more pronounced in the sock than I would have guessed from in the ball: