I am in the middle of my copy edits, and am hustling away at a pace that makes me think I should not have tried to do a comic this week. But I guess that ship has sailed. It is a week of little irritations, too: doctors appointments and AC repair and scheduled car maintenance and so on. Nothing to cry over, except maybe the fact that I woke up at 4am with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” stuck in my head (what cursed dream did this to me? Mid-May?), and it’s still there.

The heat has come for us and it will not be fleeting. The highs are still in the 90s, and so the mornings and evenings are still ok, but it is always funny to realize, at 92, 93, 96 degrees, that it will get perhaps 20 degrees hotter and I will have to live with that.

Because I’ve been copy editing, I am scrutinizing my above choices about using numerals instead of spelling the numbers out as words. But I have chosen to just be consistent here; I have never claimed to be an expert in the Chicago Manual of Style. Even teaching composition, I preferred to show my students the resources available for checking their work against a style guide, rather than teaching them the contents of a style guide; after all, they would likely encounter more than one in the course of their college careers, and the guides themselves fluctuate in terms of preferences and norms.

Baby, it’s not cold outside.

My poppies are almost done; the sunflowers are hyping up; I’m collecting seeds to plant again next year, and have dug up even the most tenaciously green of my ranunculus bulbs. The trees are still shedding pollen at an alarming rate, snowing it down on us so that just walking by a mesquite is enough to set me sneezing. The art of sneezing isn’t hard to master.

I am feeling referential and hectic, so hey, enjoy your day, enjoy your week, I hope you do not have quite as much pollen, and I hope your flower beds bloom forever.