The end of August, for me, signals the beginning of the end of the summer and the occasional dog day that is hot and humid, but it is also, in the part of the world where I live, the middle of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Many years we have the good fortune to experience an unremarkable season, but as the news out of Houston this past few days has shown, sometimes we are not as fortunate.

Harvey, which touched down at 10 in the evening last Friday as a category 4 hurricane, quickly lost steam — just 7 hours later it was downgraded to a category 1 hurricane — but this turn of events means that Harvey has lingered, and more water has fallen on the beleaguered and soggy city of Houston than ever has in recorded history.

So it is with a profound sense of just how lucky I am to be able to go about living my life that I set out on my errands today. After having made the rounds of what seemed like half of Wake County, I pulled into a Starbucks for a cappuccino, where I was greeted by this Schnauzer in the car parked next to mine:

Not only did the dog have a car, the dog also had a driver who had gone into Starbucks, no doubt to get something the dog wanted.

Unlike the dog, I didn’t have a driver to go fetch my coffee, so I was on my own, but the crew at Starbucks had me caffeinated and ready to go in no time, and just few minutes later, I was making the trek back to my house so I could get a few things done before I went over to my neighbor’s house.

As my regular readers know, I went to a crochet workshop this past weekend to learn how to make panels for an installation that Olek will be putting up in Raleigh, and after some encouragement from me, one of my neighbors agreed to join me in this endeavor, and this afternoon I went over to her house to show her how to make the practice swatch I had made over the weekend. Her dogs supervised while she and I crocheted:

Once the impromptu workshop ended, I went home to my own dog who slept near me while I finished crocheting one of the panels I have signed up to make:

Which means that all I have left to do is to tie and trim a few ends:

Sometimes the finishing work of a crochet project can end up feeling a bit tedious, but today, as I tied the ends in preparation for trimming, I was grateful that I was able to complete the most ordinary of tasks, moving forward, one stitch at a time.