It's summertime, and the beach living is breezy

 Regular readers (hi mom, hi dad!) will recall summers when the pot-addled hillbilly liked to drop in on friends and relatives who have the good fortune to own waterfront vacation property.

Alas, my cousin Johnny lost his waterfront cottage in a nasty divorce.

And my old pal Tom gave up his island in Lake of Bays.

True, I’ve still got waterfront on Bass Lake in the spring, when the water is high, but that doesn’t count for much in July.

Especially this July. We’ve been having a serious drought in these parts.

That’s a good news-bad news story.

The good news is that a dead lawn requires no grass-cutting.

The bad news is that the local beef farmers haven’t been able to get enough hay off the land to see their cattle through next winter. That’s gonna be a problem.

Be that as it may be, I was able to slip away and spend a few days at the family “cottage.” It’s not a “cottage” cottage. It’s a hundred acre farm near Lake Huron where my dear father had a rather impressive pond built so we could enjoy waterfront without actually leaving the place.

Dad’s getting on in years, and he’s facing some challenges. Just recently he got himself a new truck with all the internet-era bells and whistles.

So he tells this hilarious story about how the damned radio in his new truck was blaring full blast, and no matter what buttons he pushed on that expansive dashboard, he couldn’t figure out how to turn it down.

He goes through the Timmies drive-thru like that, having to shout into the speaker so they can hear him over the radio.

Long story short, and he figured this out just before he was gonna take the truck back to the dealership and unleash the biggest lawsuit they’d ever seen, the radio wasn’t even on! No, his Bluetooth compatible hearing aid was inadvertently picking up a music stream from his iPhone!

That’s my Dad!

On the other hand, he’s putting emojis in his emails now…

He’s way ahead of me!