Elderly Texan requests attention.

Howdy and good afternoon from the north Texas blast furnace, where the high temperature is expected to be 109° through mid-week. Weather.com has issued an “excessive heat warning” and says everybody should check on the elderly, so please be advised that I’m available to receive your calls, presents and email throughout the day. You can even drop in with a seedless watermelon if you have one. Thank you.

Not much is new here. We’re doing as little as possible to avoid exerting ourselves and being outdoors, so our weekend was filled with such activities as discussing what’s for dinner, taking naps, watching a couple of DVDs and trying to figure out where to buy new soaker hoses so our foundation won’t crack in the heat. (God bless Home Depot. They’re out of stock everywhere else.) My plans for the balance of today include a lot of laundry, running the dishwasher, hard-boiling six eggs, finishing this post and trying to return a call to the anesthesiologist from Sam’s surgery in May. Apparently they have idiotic call-back office hours from 3 to 9 p.m., so Sam asked if I’d find out what they want because he’s at work then. As you might expect, the anticipation is killing us, particularly since they’ve already been paid.

Before I forget ...

Here’s hoping you find a way to keep cool during the hottest month of the year. In Texas we mostly go to the mall, swerve around dead armadillos and whine. Thank you for reading this.