Barbara J. Hamby

OK, OK, I Give Up

I’ve decided that, as soon as room air conditioners are available at competitive prices again, we need at least one. I’m not ready to go through another day like yesterday, or even worse, a night like last night, without cooler air. The fan that’s blowing on me tonight is doing the job—but last night was a different matter. I didn’t sleep well until about 5:00 a.m. and then I slept until 9:30 and barely made it to my 10:00 a.m. meeting. We still have August and September to get through and either month might bring super hot weather.

My reorganization project in this office has suffered because I didn’t have energy to work on it either yesterday or today and I’m getting impatient to get going again. Since I didn’t feel like running errands either, I’ll need to catch up on that tomorrow and, if it’s cool enough, do some laundry. But, maybe I’ll have time to get into the closet and start tossing stuff out.

Having a lot of contacts by email and on Facebook last night made the evening go by quickly. Comparing weather conditions with friends and relatives in California, Washington, New Mexico and Texas, as well as locals, was fun. My son sent a photo of his Rube Goldberg air conditioning system—a clip on fan on the laundry chute blowing cold air from the basement to the main floor of their home. Not a bad idea. The basement apartment here is unoccupied at present, but I imagine the landlord would take a dim view of our cutting a hole in the floor. The hole the carpenter ants made is far too small to help, at least so far.

I’ve been going to the pool at various times of the day and night, thus running into different groups of people. I’m learning to keep moving while listening and talking—no easy feat with a loud fan running and my old ears not as sharp as they once were.

It cooled enough today that my appetite returned. Last night, dinner consisted of cherries and strawberries. Today I had the second half of the garlic mushroom swissburger left over from lunch. Yummy, but not exactly low-calorie.

If we’re lucky, this will be the last of the heat spell for a while. Let’s hope so.