It’s been raining non-stop for the last few days, just an ongoing drizzle, cool and wet.

No spiders. Spiders are not fans of the excessive water falling out of the sky. I’m missing my little friends.

The good news is that the vegetation is going mad, and I expect once it all dries out a bit and the sun warms up the place, we’re going to be swarming with insects, and the spiders will be joyous again.

My granddaughter has graduated from kindergarten!

She looks so eager to get out in the real world and get a job.

For over a decade now, I’ve been accustomed to screwing myself up every summer. I spend the school year focused on teaching stuff (and being snowbound much of the time), and then when I’m released in May, I leap into action and overdo it, and then every summer I can guarantee I’ll spend a month or two laid up with a knee or ankle or both wrecked. I’ve got crutches and braces set aside just in case. You don’t see most of it because you’re seeing me through the teeny-tiny porthole of the internet.

But not this year, so far (knock on wood). I’ve changed my behavior. I started out with a leisurely walk for 40 minutes to an hour every single day — every day is the key, I think. Easing into my summer routine is helping, and now I’m ramping up into a brisk walk. No pain yet! Actually, I’m feeling pretty good. Maybe I’m doing something right.

Another factor: I’m not teaching this fall, which has removed an amazing amount of stress from my life. I can’t actually separate the physical from the psychological.

Anyway, that means that right now I am compelled to get out of the house and go for a walk. Bye!

Over two weeks ago, I spotted a pair of boots abandoned in a parking lot. I’ve been keeping an eye on them — they’ve been there all this time, but I’ve seen them moved around every once in a while.

Their saga is almost over, I’m sad to report.

Farewell on your journey to the landfill!

You know most of Minnesota is totally on your side. We like Canada. So why are you trying to smoke us out?

I’m out on my daily walk, and can see the haze everywhere. We had a short, weird thunderstorm yesterday — about an hour of dark clouds, heavy rainfall, high winds, and thunder & lightning that disappeared as quickly as it appeared — but it didn’t help clear the air. Winnipeg must be even worse off.

I think I’ll just have to hold my breath while I walk home.

I was home over lunch, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a shipment of spiders, so I decided to indulge myself in a legendary movie from 1964: Spider Baby. It’s delightfully bizarre and macabre, and yes, it does include lots of spiders.

If that isn’t sufficiently enticing, check out this still:

It stars Lon Chaney jr., and look: a young Sid Haig! The plot — don’t watch it for the plot — centers on a twisted sort of Addams Family group afflicted with an imaginary genetic illness called Merrye Disease. The afflicted go mad and steadily regress to a savage state in which they become voracious cannibals. Along the way, they just develop weird obsessions. One girl likes to play spider, a game that culminates in the spider girl stinging her partner with a pair of butcher knives.

It makes no sense, but everyone seems to be having a ghastly good time playing up the grisly psychos. Recommended!

I am sad to report that my package of spiders hasn’t yet arrived. It may not get here until tomorrow.

My grandson Knut is trying on his father’s uniform.

I don’t think it fits.

I’m in terrible shape, and one of my goals for this break is to improve that shape. I have gotten consistent in the last month in doing light exercise — I make it a point to get out for a walk every morning, nothing too strenuous, just getting into a good habit.

The last few days added a few other things on top of my routine: we bought some big bags of topsoil to repair a scar in our yard. So I was ripping up these 50 pound bags, dumping them out, and raking soil over everything. It was no big deal. Ten or twenty years ago I could have done this little chore and not even noticed. Now, today, that extra effort on top of my daily walking routine has me feeling it. My quads are burning, and this piercing ache is spiking up my back.

What I need to do this morning is get back on the horse. Not literally, of course, instead I’m going to go take an easy amble at an unchallenging rate for a while. Again. And again. With the prospect of doing it more for the foreseeable future, and trying to ramp it up a little bit every day.

My feelings exactly:

That said, I’m about to go on another stupid little walk.

My wife forced me at trowel-point to work in the lawn this morning. We’ve got a big patch that was torn up by a backhoe in order to replace a broken water line, and she bought a lot of topsoil that needed to be spread over it, and we got some prairie wild grass and flower seed that we sowed over it.

My boots were caked with mud, clay, and gravel. My back is aching. I’m sweaty and dirty. I think I’ll go walk a kilometer or two and hope I can scrape off some of the residue.