Hot September blog.

Let’s see. In weather terms, September so far has been like July, August was too much like October, June and July were really April and May, and May itself rained as if a monsoon had come to Illinois. But the relative warmth and dryness of early September has had its advantages for the purpose of being out and about, which I have been recently, to an assortment of new destinations, some fairly close, others with the help of an airplane.

But it’s late on a Sunday, and I’ll soon need to cultivate REM sleep. I want to post something to get the thing started again, but I can’t do much. So as the week unfolds, I’ll take up such subjects as Bob the cremator, the ghosts of Pullman, the Electrolux ads on the floor of the Nebraska state capitol, the deafening sound of crickets and grasshoppers at a brand-new Catholic shrine, how Lewis and Clark became a cottage industry in Siouxland -- with a sidebar on the fate of poor Sgt. Floyd -- the Loess Scenic Byway, an appendix of South Dakota, and more. This may take more than a week.