Sweaty Fall

All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn’t any more available.”

Stephen Hawking

It is October 6, 2025. We are at the condo up on Canandaigua Lake, but inside with the air conditioner humming at 8:45 in the morning. As has happened for the last few weeks when we're up here, we started the morning outside on the patio with our coffee, but were forced to move inside by the unrelenting heat and lack of any sort of breeze.

The view is awfully nice,

but frankly this is getting a little disturbing. Western New York has long been a cool spot on a warming planet, but now the waning days of autumn are hot and dry. On Saturday afternoon while we were watching the UGA game on the big screen in the bar at the Reservoir Creek Golf Course in Naples, it was 83 degrees here and 73 down in Athens. This isn't normal, not at all.

We're promised a cold snap by the end of the week, with highs around sixty and bright sunshine. I guess that's progress, but we've seen October days filled with snow, a thing of the past it seems. We'll see how the month ends.

This year I made a goal of working a half-day on Fridays, as so many of my professional colleagues have done for much of my career. That hasn't gone so well, with the phone blowing up even as P and I are driving up the valley to the lake after she leaves work at 4:30. That'll change as my caseload ebbs, perhaps. In the meantime, what seems to be developing is a pattern of less-than-full-days on Monday, today, which P now takes off as she scales back work to four days a week. It's awfully hard to lean into anything other than reading the paper and sipping coffee in the morning, with Peg curled up on the couch in her nightie reading a book. So perhaps this will become the pattern.

I'm representing a nice couple in a mediation in about an hour. We're fussing over $8,000.00, which may be the total cost of today's exercise once the lawyers and the mediator tally up their bills. It's the sort of silliness I'm ready to leave behind. Afterward P will drive me up to Canandaigua airport, where I left the Mighty Columbia on Saturday after picking it up from Buffalo.

One only rarely sees another Columbia on the tarmac, so I made a point of parking next to a very nice one, an old Lancair build, when I spotted it in front of the FBO.

The FBO was guarded by a calico cat, who sat on the table tolerating my petting her while I read the paper on my tablet and waited for P to pick me up.

I digress again. Old age and ADD, I guess.

Anyway, I'll fly the Columbia back to KELM and wait there for P to come get me--it's about 25 minutes for me to fly down there, and a little over an hour for Peg in the Caddy to drive down the Cohocton Valley to scoop me up. That should get us to the Schoolhouse in time for me to squeeze in a little tax homework before we reheat the Beef on Weck we made last night for our Buffalo-themed feast before watching the first quarter of the Bills' pathetic performance against the Pats. Their defense has been shaky all season, particularly against the run. Last night New England was running all over them when Peg fell snoring asleep and I started nodding off a little. Glad I didn't stay up to see the carnage.

Time to get ready for that mediation.