Feed Your Brain

From The Spokesman Review:

Saturday turned out to be a record day for temperatures across the Inland Northwest. It hit 101 degrees at the Spokane International Airport, tying the record set in 1971. Lewiston, Idaho also tied a record at 106 degrees.

Other high temperatures on Saturday include Wenatchee at 107 degrees. Moses Lake and Ephrata topped out at 105 and Coeur d’Alene reached just 99 degrees. None of those cities tied or broke records.

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Yup, it's hot. I have a small window A/C that keeps the house at about 82, provided I keep bathroom and bedroom doors shut. I can live with that. So this week while I was canning green beans, beets and zucchini relish, I was thinking about how things were for people "back in the day" when there wasn't A/C or even electric stoves. Grandma would be in the kitchen doing these things on her wood cook stove. Putting up everything that couldn't be immediately used, for future use... making bread, cooking meals for the crews working in the fields, and taking care of all the rest of the household work. How much fun would it NOT be to have a wood stove fired up all day long with temps outside at a hundred degrees?? I certainly can respect the satisfaction she had to have felt looking in the pantry seeing jars of veggies, fruits and meats lined up on her shelves from floor to ceiling! I'd be willing to bet that back in the day there were very few people who suffered from insomnia, too. Come bedtime they would have been too exhausted to lay awake thinking about things, I'm sure.

I think we take an awful lot for granted in our lives. I know I do, and the more I've deliberately stepped back from the hectic, fast-paced style of living that we're stuck in today, the more I realize how out-of-control the world is. Scary stuff. Alas, a soapbox for another time, since it's now time to go to work.

Challenge of the day: Do something today that isn't wholly dependent upon someone else having done all the work for your convenience.