{"id":23814,"date":"2025-07-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23814"},"modified":"2025-07-20T15:27:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T20:27:40","slug":"love-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23814","title":{"rendered":"Love Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It&#8217;s summertime, and I used to love summer, but now I&#8217;m starting to loathe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s too warm during the day to want to go outside, and the heat, whether average or excessive, is a constant reminder of global warming. We&#8217;ve already had two or three heatwaves this summer. During a heatwave we can&#8217;t even enjoy the outdoors at night or sleep without the AC.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ticks and mosquitoes. They&#8217;re everywhere. You can&#8217;t step in a patch of grass or brush against a plant without wondering if you now have a tick crawling on you. That&#8217;s not paranoia. It&#8217;s just the way things are. And the mosquitoes are always lurking. Sometimes they linger around our front and back doors, which makes it easy for them to sneak inside, and I always wonder how they know to be there. They can&#8217;t know what doors are (portals to the inside of a home, where tasty human meals await), so what makes doors so attractive from a mosquito&#8217;s point of view?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The kids are home all the time, while I have to work and can&#8217;t spend much time with them. This summer is particularly bad in that respect, because my employers stuck me with an unforgiving schedule that makes taking vacation time nearly impossible. I&#8217;ve had to work longer-than-usual days just to keep up.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There&#8217;s hardly anywhere interesting to go where there aren&#8217;t too many people. Ever since that awful trip to the renaissance faire (when we had to wait forever for food and Livia literally passed out while standing in line), I&#8217;ve been leery of taking the kids anywhere. Everything has gotten super expensive, too. So I guess it&#8217;s fine that I have no time for it anyway.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Summer is when our health, home, and auto insurance plans all renew, and the premiums always increase and\/or we lose benefits. Health insurance is the worst. It&#8217;s evil, and a scam, and every July at renewal time I want to scream. This year we&#8217;re losing out-of-network coverage, which is scary. If we should have an emergency and need to go to an out-of-network provider, we will have to pay 100% out of pocket and it will not count toward our deductible. The alternative was to pay an extra $3,000 per year up-front to get a paltry 50% out-of-network coverage. That didn&#8217;t seem like a good bet, but a gamble is exactly what this is, and who knows how it will play out? Our home and auto renewal package arrived in the mail a couple of days ago. I haven&#8217;t had the courage to open it yet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>There are still some great things about summer&#8211;sunset walks, dragonflies and hummingbirds, wildflowers, grilled food&#8211;but it gets harder to enjoy them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope it won&#8217;t always be like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope someday I&#8217;ll be able to love summer again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s summertime, and I used to love summer, but now I&#8217;m starting to loathe it. There are still some great things about summer&#8211;sunset walks, dragonflies and hummingbirds, wildflowers, grilled food&#8211;but it gets harder to enjoy them. I hope it won&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23814\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23814"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23814"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23816,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23814\/revisions\/23816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}