The weather widget hits that C-note again.
Summer doesn’t officially arrive until tomorrow, but I’m already pretty much over it.
This sweaty conga line of triple-digit temps is starting to remind me of summers on Randolph AFB outside San Antonio. Your options were the swimming pool or some indoor sport, like Monopoly under the Fedders window unit. Venture outdoors for the usual boyish hijinks and you risked sinking into the asphalt like a Pleistocene mammoth stumbling into the La Brea tar pits.
Eventually we’d flee by car to Sioux City, Iowa, to visit my maternal grandmother. This was not an upgrade.
Our neighbors have been scurrying off to the high country on weekends to camp or VRBO it for a couple days, take five from the heat.
We’ve been sticking it out for a variety of perfectly unsatisfactory reasons. For instance, rather than join me in blissful sloth and torpor, Herself persists in gainful employment. Extra-credit tasks are assigned regularly by Herself the Elder, lest the devil find work for her daughter’s rarely idle hands. And finally, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is not an agreeable travel companion. The sounds she emits in a moving vehicle make a Marjorie Taylor Greene screed sound like the “Ave Maria.”
But we can’t blame this on the cat. Even the dogs are out of bounds, according to Ken Layne over at Desert Oracle Radio.
“Take the dog out at 8 o’clock and it’s still 100 degrees. The dog’s looking at me like, ‘What did you do?’ And I say, ‘Look, I did not do it.’ But of course I did; my species, anyway. The dogs just went along for the ride. It would be nice to blame them. ‘You’re the one who always wanted to get in the car and stick your head out the window when the A/C was on.’ But it’s not their fault.”
Tags: Desert Oracle Radio, summer
Mad Blog Media 
June 19, 2021 at 2:51 pm |
First thing I do after downing some coffee is take the hound out for a walk at the dog park. If I wait much past eight, its scorching.
June 19, 2021 at 3:23 pm |
I bleeve Señor Oracle is talking about walking the dog around 8 p.m. I recall more than a few nights in Tucson, getting off work at 1 a.m., slamming a couple stouts at The Shanty on Fourth, and then heading home at closing time. It would still be 90-something outside.
But yeah, mornings are now the thing. I’ve been getting out really early for the old bikey ridey, which is disrupting my breakfast schedule and my general serenity. I like to sort of sneak up on my mornings.
June 20, 2021 at 3:13 am |
I got woken up at Stupid-Dark-Thirty by birds turning my tree into a pop-up rave/pickup bar AND by the whiff of skunk. Undoubtedly the skunk has the intent of conveying: “There you go. Now it’s truly stinkin’ hot!”
During the day, my cat, a Mia Sopaipilla Clone franchisee, seeks refuge in the underbrush. When she realizes that the Stunned Rodent Travelling Buffet has been cancelled due to the heat, both she and her brother launch into a cat chorus at sufficient volume that uninformed self-righteous neighbours can hear it over the din of their churning Freon Pumps and complain.
Me? I’m viewing this heat as training for my eventual posting in Eternity.
June 20, 2021 at 6:16 am |
We’ve been spared the skunks (knocking on wood). We have been getting raccoons, foxes, and deer, all of which keep the racket — both audio and olfactory — to a minimum.
Not so the crickets, which have turned up with a vengeance. Holy hell, when you get one of those sonsabitches singing an aria in this house, with the brick pavers, the sound carries. We’ve got one under the toilet in the guest bathroom who thinks he’s Pavaratti.