It’s as if life decided to imitate the RennFest, except instead of people wearing swords and daggers and speaking to each other with exagerrated politeness and eating lots of turkey legs (all of which would be fine by me), it’s decided just to be swelteringly hot.
Unlike some parts of the US of A, when we get swelteringly hot here, the swelter part is just our own sweat, which tends to bake off quickly, leaving us a crunchy golden-brown. This is in stark contrast to where double-90s head and humidity not only peel the wallpaper off the walls, but also the sheetrock and the nails. Not for a zillion dollars could you get me living much further east or south.
(Well, maybe for a zillion dollars, enough to live in a huge, palatial, well-air-conditioned habitrail.)
Where we don’t have humidity, this year we have smoky haze, and if it’s not as bad and ashy as in the first days of the Hayman Fire, it’s still a gentle miasma permeating everything, especially when you turn on all the fans to try to cool off the house.
Each year around this time Margie and I look at each other and wonder why the hell we don’t have air conditioning. It’s still something of a rarity here, especially in houses over ten years old. We sit and listen to the sweat dripping off our bodies and sizzling on the carpet and shake our heads. “We really should. It can’t be that expensive, right?”
Well, yes, it can. And in a week or two, when the temps drop back into the 80s and the evening breezes cool things off very nicely, we’ll laugh and forget all about it except to congratulate ourselves on how weather in Colorado is not all that bad.
It’s sort of like child birth, I guess. If you really remembered how uncomfortable pregnancy and childbirth is (and I’m talking about for fathers here, let alone mothers), you’d never, ever contemplate it again. But a few months later (albeit in a sleep-deprived state), you congratulate yourself on how you got through it with relative ease, and a few months after that, it fades into a series of amusing anecdotes and archived blog entries.
Katherine had much fun yesterday afternoon. I got a big cat litter bucket (long since retired from that function) and filled it with water on the back deck. That’s about as heavy an object as a trust on our deck, but it was just big enough for her to crouch down into, and she had a marvelous time scooping out water with a coffee mug and pouring it onto the deck, where it splashed and gurgled down to the dirt below.
After about the third time refilling the bucket, we substituted a collander for the mug, which was just as fun for her, but a lot less water-intensive.
Margie and I just sweated, though we took a cool shower before bed time, which was quite nice. The shower, that is, though bed time wasn’t bad either.