Sky King here, your high-flying traffic reporter, floating over the south lakeshore, with your holiday traffic report for the Brimley metroplex. I am keeping an eye in the sky on the travels and travails down below, so you do not have to. Overall, this evening’s traffic is moving smoothly, with only a little bit of a slowdown here and there. There is some congestion on Cock-a-doddle Lane, but the heart of this jam is on Curmudgeon Court. It is practically a parking lot down there. No one is moving. I do not know what is causing this situation. It might be a jackknifed water buffalo or maybe something even more arcane. It is too hard to see what is going on beneath the trees. I will be loitering overhead until either the problem is resolved, or I run out of gas and become the problem.

The temperature here has been hovering in the low sixties for days now, what with first Canadian wildfire smoke and then fog, we have hardly even seen the sun for days. That is until today. Today, the hot weather that has been plaguing much of the country broke through the northern Jetstream and this morning it jumped from the low sixties to the mid-eighties in only a couple of hours. Not to worry though, we here in the old cabin have cool that we have not even used yet. Really, it is like cave here. Then there is the lake too. There are no longer ice cubes bobbing in the water, but it has not been that long. Wading into the water up to one’s individual comfort level is always a guaranteed cool down.

Back home in Saint Louis it is hot and the traffic sucks. When we first moved to town there, we encountered an interesting accent. It was most pronounced when listening to the KMOX traffic copter reports. Highway forty was pronounced highway farty and its neighboring highway, forty-four, was called farty-far. This holiday being the Fourth, in Saint Louis it is welcomed as a happy farth of July.