It has been, so far, for the most part, dry this July.
And this is not good for any part of the earth, nor for any participant in the life of the earth, in the long run. Yet in short spans, it speeds up my bicycling pace, because the air weighs less, presses less, and billows more, so like a sail in a good breeze, I carry my body faster with less effort. A mixed blessing? What is a mixed blessing? I think a blessing either is or it is not. So I won’t go with that colloquialism. A mixed metaphor? What is a metaphor? I think it is a way of illustrating an idea through equating it with an object that may not have ever been thought of in the way the idea uses it, but once the idea is equated with the object, the object takes on a more detailed face, more lines define it, like narrow ruled paper enables more words on a page than wide ruled paper. So, then, what is a mixed metaphor? What do you think? Is dry air being both beneficial and detrimental a mixed metaphor? Or is it just two actualities of the same force?
Where am I going? Don’t know. Perhaps, whichever way the wind blows…
I bicycle often these days (as usual), often for pleasure, but often I time my tasks, my chores to coincide with good air and wind conditions, conducive to good bicycling experience. I like that it is possible to mix up the order of tasks according to conditions. In my life these days, I can usually do this. Would that all of the world could go when it is good to go, and stop when it is best to stop. So often these options are not able to be part of a plan. If they were, would there be more peace? I ask because I think much of what we fight over is due to the existence of time and task schedules set by gain objectives, or even less desirably, by self-preservation, self-promotion, or self-protection motives. They take time out of our hands, they take, therefore, choice out of our hands and gift it to–generally–not common, not personal, and therefore not natural good. They disturb the possibility of joy of being.
Do I sound a nay sayer? Do I sound a glass is half emptier? Do I sound like the Eeyore moaner? Or do I offer a visual that, when observed and considered, can encourage, even enable, reordering of what seems to matter toward what does–that which benefits the largest number of impacted beings be they insects, trees, consumers, producers, waterbodies, all fauna, all flora, all air–all that exists and can enable not disable all else to exist.
Today while pedaling, I paused to watch a father squatting in the center of a dead end street jutting off the urban street I was on. He squatted with two young children, I am guessing his, showing them how to hold a ball in a baseball glove, AND, how to keep the cumbersome glove on their small, very mobile hands. And I watched a mixed-breed puppy watching them, squirming while practicing sitting still, the desired stillness encouraged by soft commands-verbal and manual. It caused me to smile, and pedal a little slower so to see more of what I passed along the way.
So, I worry at the extremities of weather, and I worry about the intensity of time and energy allotment.
But I have hope.
whereIwonder&why 
Yes, I agree that dry air is a mixed blessing. It is bad because it deprives us of needed rain, and it is good because it makes bicycling more pleasant. Bit it does not make biking more pleasant because the air weighs less. It doesn’t! Humid air weighs less than dry air because the H2O molecules are lighter than the N2 and O2 molecules they displace. I think the biking is more pleasant simply because the air is dry and more readily cools the biker by evaporating her sweat!
Now I will go and read the rest of your post!
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Bill, very belatedly I replay, thank you. Perhaps it weighs less, but it feels more suffocating than air that lifts away. But, again, that being said, at least it is moisture.
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