Here we are slipping into August and it’s about time.

We’re kind of halfway through summer — as the crow flies — it’s gradually getting to be just right for sitting on the porch and thinking about nothing in particular.

Someone once said August is a gentle reminder for not doing a single thing from your New Year’s resolutions for seven months and not doing it for another five. That’s me I fear, because I still haven’t vacuumed the ceiling fan that I promised myself I would back in January. The thinking at the time was that there would be enough wind in the spring to blow the cobwebs out the window.

While we’re in the bedroom, I read somewhere there’s a philosophical dif­ference in the way people keep their housekeeping. First, there’s the person who makes the bed every morning, all tidy and tight with hospital corners. Then there’s the type who figures it will get all messed up again when they go to bed that night, anyway … so why bother?

Somewhere in between are my kind of people: the bedspread flingers. Am I alone on this?

Last weekend, I went through my annual “going through the closet” motions to pick out what I should give up on. There’s one pair of jeans that has devel­oped a couple of holes around the knee and pocket area, but these days, those holes add another ten bucks to the price of new jeans, so I’m keeping them.

Speaking of clothes, we’re entering that back-to-school period, the time to get new clothes and all the other things the kiddoes need, that is, if you’re not one of those parents that get mileage out of hand-me-downs. If nothing else, while you’re there, you can stock up on the Halloween candy they’ve already started putting on the shelves, but I don’t think the tax-free thing applies to those.

Personally, I’m thinking of buying a new cowboy hat; they are on the approved list. I have the same black hat I bought at Brownbilt in 2004, and I have to admit it’s getting a little grungy and shopworn.

It’s not like it has hat sweat odor or anything, but maybe it’s time to relegate it to nonpublic use.

So far, I’m thinking of going with the kind of fedora Humphrey Bogart wore in “The Maltese Falcon” or a jaunty bush hat with one side brim snapped up. Maybe a lumberjack hat with flopping ear flaps. Or not.

As for Halloween candy, I may still have some left over from last year. Just in case, I looked in the pantry and found, not candy, but a box of graham crackers that had an expiration date of March 2020.

I’m thinking it’s a good thing clothes don’t have an expiration date. Granted, there may be a “best when used by” date, especial­ly when my size 30 waist seems to be getting snugger, but other than that, we’re talking an indefinite time limit. Holes and all.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve passed my own “best when used by date,” but then something new comes along that gets one all worked up. I keep reading discourses and little factoids about new technological advances that have given us an abundance of labor-saving devices and shortcuts.

We’ve been living in an electronically-technologically whatchmacallit world for at least a good two decades now, and even more so since the invasion of the quote-unquote smartphones 15 years ago. Things are moving along at what seems like such a fast clip I’m having a hard time keeping up, but now and then certain things give me pause.

Take the silliness of talking on the telephone while driving a car. It doesn’t seem so long ago that all tele­phones were hard-wired to the wall and there were people called operators who did all the connecting.

This came back to me the other day while I was driving, and a song came on called “Operator” by Jim Croce. You may know it; it came out in 1973, and it talks about a guy calling information for a long-distance number: a number scribbled on a matchbook cover that had faded out.

I’m betting that most of the 18-year-olds enter­ing college this fall have no idea what an operator is/ was, as well as a matchbook cover, or even something called long-distance. On top of that, the song ends with the phrase, “You can keep the dime.” More confusion.

It’s a very nice song, but clearly, it needs anno­tations for my high schooler grandkids.

To be honest, though, despite all my whin­ing about technology, I was listening to the song through my car radio, which was Bluetoothed from my Fire tablet with music downloaded from Spotify.

Did I just use Bluetooth as a verb? Oh, heavens, I guess I’m doomed to live in the present.

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain