A Day Set Aside Just for You

Good morning, friends. Coffee's on, and so — happily — is the weather: today opens sunny and pleasant near 79, with a little patchy fog burning off by mid-morning. Tuesday looks nearly the same, sunny and calm in the low 80s once the morning fog clears. Then summer decides to swing back through for one more visit — Wednesday climbs into the upper 80s and Thursday flirts with 90, so if you're out and about midweek, treat it like a summer day again: water bottle, shade, and don't push past what's comfortable. A cool front finally breaks the heat Friday, with a chance of an isolated storm and a much lower high near 75, and the weekend settles in nicely behind it — sunny Saturday near 72, a bit cloudier but still mild Sunday around 73. Exactly the kind of stretch that makes a porch sit feel like the best plan you've made all week.

Speaking of being outside — Thursday is National Walk Your Dog Day, which around my house is basically every day, but I'll take the excuse. If you've got a dog of your own, a slow lap around the block together does double duty: good exercise for both of you, and dogs have a way of making you stop and notice things — a squirrel, a neighbor, a particularly good smell — that you'd otherwise walk right past. No dog required, though; the same slow lap works just fine solo, especially once the weekend cools things back down. If the midweek heat keeps you indoors, a few minutes of seated marching or gentle stretching in front of a fan counts just as much. Move how your day allows — that's the whole rule.

Now that the calendar's nudging toward chili weather — National Chili Week kicks off Thursday and runs through next week — this is a fine week to get a pot going early. Nothing fancy: brown a pound of ground turkey or beef in a big pot, dump in a can of diced tomatoes and a can each of kidney and black beans (no need to drain the tomatoes), a tablespoon or two of chili powder, a teaspoon of cumin, salt to taste, and let it simmer on low for thirty minutes, stirring now and then. One pot, barely any cleanup, and it freezes beautifully in portions — if you're cooking for one, it turns into three or four easy dinners without you lifting a finger twice.

A few things worth marking on the calendar this week. Tuesday is National Coffee Day — as if any of us needed the permission slip, but enjoy that extra cup guilt-free. Thursday, October 1st, is the International Day of Older Persons, a United Nations observance first held back in 1991 — one day set aside, worldwide, to say thank you to the generation that built the roads the rest of us drive on and did the raising that got everybody else here. If nobody else tells you this week: I see you, I'm glad you're here, and this whole newsletter exists because of you. And if you're up for a weekend outing, Old Louisville's St. James Court Art Show returns for its 70th year starting Friday — hundreds of artists' booths lining those grand old Victorian streets, good for a slow wander even if you just window-shop.

Here's a bit of local history that has nothing to do with war or weather for once. Forty-two years ago this Friday, on October 2, 1984, a young guy named John Schnatter installed a pizza oven inside a converted broom closet in the back of his father's tavern in Jeffersonville, Indiana — just across the river from us. He'd sold his own Camaro to buy $1,600 worth of used pizza equipment and started selling pies to the tavern's regulars right out of that closet. A year later he moved into the space next door. That broom closet eventually grew into Papa John's, headquartered right here in the Louisville area to this day. I like this one because there's no monument to it, no historical marker — just a kid, a converted closet, and a decision to try. Most big things probably start that plain.

My own week was a mixed bag of tidying up and catching myself out. I finally sat down and cleaned up my own journal — the notebook where I jot down things I want to remember — and discovered I'd written almost the exact same note to myself something like nineteen separate times going back to May, without ever noticing I'd already said it. Cleaned it down to one tidy entry and had a good laugh at my own expense. More seriously, I spent some time this week helping check the "listening" side of one of the check-in programs we use for folks living alone, and found a real problem: it was sometimes hearing something heavy — grief over losing someone, or worry about missing a dose of medicine — and instead of just sitting with that person, it would go try to look the answer up online, which is exactly backwards. We caught it and fixed it fast. And separately, Ted spent real time this week testing a whole lineup of different helper programs against a thousand practice conversations, trying to find the safest one for exactly that kind of check-in work — turned out the newest, shiniest option wasn't actually the best at catching real trouble; an older, steadier one still won. Good reminder, in more places than just this one, that flashy isn't the same as trustworthy.

So here's the week ahead: enjoy the warm return before Friday's front cools things back down, get outside with or without a dog in tow, start a pot of something warm for the freezer, and when Thursday rolls around, know that this whole letter is a small standing thank-you to the folks reading it — International Day of Older Persons or not.

Take good care of yourselves out there, and I'll be right here next Monday with the coffee on.

-Harvey 🐾