Scorcher

I'm not sure how many days in a row it's been above 90, but it's been too many days in a row. I'm sweating 24/7, like a pig (as they say), like a waterfall, like a downpour. My back is in a constant state of moisture, the back of my head dark with wetness.

I'm not going to say I hate heat, but I am close to it after this week (it must be a week at least of this temperature breaking weather). The heat has literally made me ill. I can't sleep or when I sleep, it's fitful and sweaty and when I wake, I'm nauseated and a bit dizzy and head to toe sticky. It's not a big deal, just uncomfortable and not very motivating.

Still, through it all we've continued to work on the old part of the house. The living room is done, just a few more pieces of furniture and rug to purchase and we can call it good. Since I'm not sleeping, we get up early (I force Ann to wake with a homemade latte) and continue to paint the spare bedroom/soon-to-be TV room. It's the last room, Ann keeps claiming, but there's still the old bathroom that will eventually need to get redone (Winter break, Ann tells me, let's not tackle it until December) and the new fence to stain, all 100 feet of it...both sides.

I think the paint fumes in this heat are worse, too. Part of my nausea, I think.

But I'm only going to paint the fence when it's cooler. It's too hot to do much of anything except read, lie by the fan and solve Sudoku puzzles, or eat chilled watermelon and drink icy lemonade...only because of my queasiness, none of the eating part sounds very good...so it's cold water for me...but even that feels a bit ill-making.

Okay, truth be told, I'm a whiner when it comes to heat. To think we traveled back to Iowa every summer when I was a kid and lived in this kind of heat. And there were mosquitoes too. Was I miserable then? I'll have to ask my parents. What I remember is that we went to the city pool and spent the day there, swimming, eating candy, and drinking root beer. I remember being hot at night and itchy from all the bug bites, but now, as I steam in this current scorcher, I don't remember being this miserable when I was 6 or 7.

I probably was, though. I never adapted. Hence, I am a Pacific Northwesterner in my heart of hearts (though I was born in Iowa). Ann grew up in Wisconsin and her solution to the heat is to lie in the tub filled with cold bath water. She says people in the Midwest do it all the time. That and change their clothes a lot. And they move slowly. I often tease her because she has a tendency to talk without really moving her mouth much. She says that's because she grew up where it was so cold in the winter, you didn't want to expose too much moisture to the elements or you could end up frozen in mid-sentence. I thought, with this heat, her mouth should be performing gymnastics, but still she mumbles a bit and moves her lips very little. When I confronted her about this contradiction, she said that moving one's lips takes energy and makes you sweat, therefore she continues to conserve energy lest she fall over from heat exhaustion in the summer and frozen lip syndrome in the winter.

She says that the heat out here is nothing like the heat out there because of the humidity factor, but I'm not out there, I'm out here and it seems pretty darn hot and significantly humid to me.

She also says, "No bug bites here, quit whining." Okay, I agree with that, but still, it's too damn hot...it's even made my blogging limp...and soggy.