Everybody Talks About It. . .

Tomorrow the forecast in Pleasant Grove is for 101 degrees. The Google app that gives me weather forecasts estimates it will be 4 degrees hotter than today. That means today was 96 degrees.

I drove past the high school today. The high school has a thermometer. It read 102.7. I’ve never understood why the public thermometers show us the fractions. I mean, why? Can anyone really tell the difference between 102.7 and 102? For that matter, can you really tell the difference between 102 and 103?

It’s just hot.

I spent some time outside today. We are redoing our sprinkler system. It’s requiring a lot of digging. Hundreds of feet of 8-12″ deep 6″ wide GI Joe sized trenches. The final one was about 60 feet along the driveway. Our ground has a lot of clay in it. Clay without water is basically a brick. Ever try to dig through a brick?

We ran a lot of water over our yard, especially on the areas we were trenching. We ran water down the edge of the driveway several times. Today, I spent about an hour under the 102 degree sun. We now have a trench 8-12″ deep, 6″ wide down the edge of the driveway.

I’m also in the middle of rebuilding the engine in my daughter’s Kia. Her car is actually in the way. We piled dirt on the driveway. It’s almost enough to take the place of the jack stands.

A car repair has three stages:

• Disassembly
• Repair
• Reassembly

I’m discovering that sprinkler work is the same say. Digging the trenches is the disassembly. And often disassembly is the longest part. Now that we’re done with the digging, my neighbor will install the new sprinkler heads, the pipes, the filter (we never had one before) and a new hose bib.

After the repair is done, comes reassembly. When we dug the trenches, we cut the sod and folded the sod back. We then dug out the dirt and put it on the opposite side of the trench from the sod.

Reassembly will happen after the pipes get put in place. It should only be a couple of days. We’ll be back out in the sun. And that’s what has me thinking about weather. The app for the ten day forecast shows those bright sun bursts as far out as the app can see. If the forecast was 96, but it was actually 102, and tomorrow’s forecast is 101 that means it will probably be closer to 105 or 106.

And it will be under that shining ball of flame, 93 million miles away, but just over my head.

Everyone talks about the weather but no one every does anything about it.

Stay safe

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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