It’s too hot to putter in the garden if there’s an excess of okra fuzz lurking.

It’s too hot to take in ironing, as Granny used to have to do.

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It’s too hot to be out mowing, hoeing, leaf-blowing, or pirogueing.

It’s too hot to be roofing, and way too hot if hot tar is involved.

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It’s too hot to quarry, or to stalk quarry, or to be unduly quarrelsome when you’re out hunting or digging rocks.

It’s too hot to quail, hunt quail, eat quail, or bother correcting his spelling.

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It’s too hot for too much rolling or tongueing when the thumping starts  in the brush arbor yonder.

It’s too hot to be grilling, unless you have one of those Justice Department political hacks in the dock.

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It’s too hot to be pitching softball, a tent, or woo.

It’s too hot to get Popsicles home from the store still on the stick.

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It’s too hot to be attending any fluvial baptizings not your own.

It’s too hot to be out chamoising your chrome.

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It’s too hot to be making a run for it.

It’s too hot for Carl Childers fans to be out franch-fryin’ potaters.

It’s too hot to be out milking rattlesnakes, or any other kind of snakes.

It’s too hot to clean fish, seine barpits, or bale hay.

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It’s too hot to clean house, even as a figure of speech.

It’s too hot for a redress of grievances, or for dressing them in the first place.

It’s too hot to be canning if it involves toiling over a pressure cooker in an unventilated farm kitchen the way it used to.

It’s too hot to be skateboarding when melting pavement gums up your wheels.

It’s too hot to be changing a flat tire, so just run it on the rim till you get where you’re going. If you do.

It’s too hot to be cleaning out a shed, or doing anything in a shed, especially if it has a tin roof. And spiders.

It’s too hot to be listening to blowhard talk radio, lest the spittle and lather together inspire you to go shoot up a liberal church.

It’s too hot to be picking peas, so if you’re on the long line at Cummins, tell ’em you believe you’ll just sleep in till September.

It’s too hot to be thinking too much about multibillion-dollar bail-outs, and how you’re never on the receiving end of one of the sons-a-bitches.

It’s too hot to make attendance mandatory at your Republican campaign rallies, and someone should tell Wal-Mart.

It’s too hot to say premillenial dispensationalist much less be one.

It’s too hot to be out trying to chase free-loading squirrels away from your hard-earned nut trees.

It’s too hot to taunt other drivers already purple with road rage who might be armed.

It’s too hot to expect any more or any better out of this sorry bunch running things than we’ve got from them so far.

It’s too hot to formulate retorts to the provocations of nitwits.

It’s too hot to quibble.

It’s too hot to krump or crunk.

It’s too hot to ratiocinate, bloviate, tergiversate, vacillate, prate, wait, orate, advocate, weed-eat, or Garden Weasel, and too hot not to procrastinate, abbreviate, vegetate, hibernate, and forgive bigots for the time being.

It’s too hot to fan flies off the potato salad or try from a fundamental sense of decency to discourage the dog-peter gnats.

It’s too hot to wax nostalgic, or your mustache, or your car.

It’s too hot to pump iron, or gas, or up the volume, or your fist Tiger-like when you make a putt.

It’s too hot to make a fuss about them wanting to hang you if it’s with a new rope.

It’s too hot to wonk.

It’s much too hot to mosh.

It’s too hot to try to figure out the difference between what Wally writes and what he means.

It’s too hot to be out in weedy places looking for poke. Or snipe.

It’s too hot to be brownnosing a superior, or anybody else.

It’s too hot to be faith-healing a bunch of people whose ailments were of a dubious nature to begin with.

It’s too hot for staff meetings or camp meetings or revival meetings or cabinet meetings or summit meetings or any other meetings, trysts, assignations, reunions, get-togethers, or rendezvous.

It’s too hot for pepper games or to fungo pops or shag them..

It’s too hot to stew over pricks – you know who they are – who think accountability is something that applies only to everybody else.

It’s too hot to rue the wasted days and wasted nights and all the lost weekends. Too hot to start trying to make up for what can’t be made up for.

It’s too hot to care whether the editorial writers at the local daily ever master the folksy style that has eluded them so far with such comic consequences.

It’s too hot for the marching band to be out there getting up its halftime show.

It’s too hot to take umbrage.

It’s too hot to second-guess.

It’s too hot to fool with it.

Definitely too hot for shoes.

 

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