After the National Weather Service calling the previous month “the hottest July on record” in both the United States and many other parts of the world, August began with a high temperatures forecast in the 70s for the next few days before returning to the 80 during the weekend.

When we retired to Floyd County in 2004, I told wife Amy that we should see days with lower humidity and heat thn the 32 years we endured in the National Capital Region of Washington, DC, and on the Mississippi River in the St. Louis metro area (her hometown, where we met and where I reported from for a dozen years before.

I remembered the 1960s, when I lived in Floyd County during high school years. I drove a car without air conditioning and most homes in the county did not have air. The summers were much milder than they are now. Consider it another part of Global Warming. Oops. I forgot. This is a county controlled by Repubican extremists who claim Global Warming and Climate Change do not exist.

Well, it does exits and we saw much of it during July after a cooler than normal Spring and a winter where the lows, for the first time in two decades, fell well below zero.

Lingering problems from the severe blood and muscular infections that could have cost me my left leg from the knee down are keeping me off motorcycles for the time being and it’s too damn hot on too many days to ride with the top down in convertibles. Unlike the 60s, most vehicles — and homes — in Floyd County and Southwestern Virginia now have air conditioning.

My adult daughter and her husband have moved back to the St. Louis area after several years in the Seatlle area and has been suffering iin the oppressive heat and storms that have gripped the midwest. Misery, it seems, has company in our family.

Assuming the forecasts from the National Weather Service office in Blacksburg is accuate, always a questionable assumption, the weather in this areas is expecterd to be in the upper 70s for today and Wednesday and Thursday,, followed by a drop into the lower 70s with rain on Thursday and thunderstorms on Friday.

Then back into the 80s on Saturday and thunderstorms on Sunday and Monday.

Welcome to August, another month of bad hair days for Mother Nature.