Dog Days of Summer

I said to my daughter, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." She hadn't heard that before. So I told her next, "Hot enough for ya?" These are phrases everyone should know before their tenth birthday. Our air-conditioned existence is pushing us further and further away from Mother Nature. I am as guilty as anyone, sitting in my a/c house working on the computer instead of swimming at the pool. Tsk, tsk. Just a generation ago, my family of five would load up into our Buick, roll down and windows and proceed to sweat through Illinois and Iowa to get to Grandma Wallin's house in Omaha. As a parent, I could always tell when the temperature hit ninety degrees by the nature of the arguments. (How do you get the degree sign in HTML?) As we become a more urban population worldwide, will we forget why we need nature?