Hat on Top, Coat Below
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Praise Be to A.C.
June 26, 2006
Summer is my least favorite season. I can’t take the heat (or the humidity), and I can’t always get out of the kitchen. At least now I have a car with air conditioning; my first car didn’t. I can clearly remember sticky summer days driving that car home from work when I had the job that required me to wear pantyhose–more than once I wriggled out of my nylons while stuck in traffic on I-94, unable to stand being encased one more second. I guess that wasn’t so much summer’s fault but rather a side effect of growing up. When I was a kid, I could wear whatever I wanted and lay around all day if it was too hot to move. Not so as an adult (though at least I no longer work at a place that forces me to don a costume–unless it’s during the user conference, of course). I know not every summer day is beastly hot and sticky–this past weekend was gorgeous, actually, warm enough to relax into but nowhere near hot enough to melt me–but the potential is there, lurking from June to August and sometimes beyond.
Summer as a grown up with a house also means weeding. Not that I do a lot of it–if you could see our yard you’d know that–but once in a while I’ll feel embarrassed and/or guilty enough to get out there and yank up perfectly healthy plants that just aren’t on the approved list. I kicked off this past weekend in just that way, sitting down on the sidewalk after work on Friday and clearing the bed under the yew tree, which thanked me for my trouble by scraping up my right arm so now I look like I was attacked by a cat and I didn’t even get to pet something furry first. At least I didn’t also get bit by mosquitoes, which is another downside to summer. Mosquitoes love me and leave me with big welts.
Summer also means noise. Last night just as I was ready to go to sleep, I heard fireworks. Not the neighbors celebrating a successful BBQ by lighting a few M80s kind but the shot up into the sky by professionals kind. What? On a random Sunday night in late June? What’s up with that–some municipality getting a jump on 4th of July celebrations? I put in my earplugs but could still hear the explosions. For the next half hour I tried not to listen but couldn’t avoid it. I blamed the community just to the south of us, which has a fest every year to celebrate the liberation of acres and acres of farmland in order to create subdivisions and strip malls, but Googling this morning revealed that it wasn’t them–they had their fest last week; it was most likely the community to the east of us, which finished up some sort of week-long bender last night. Maybe none of them have jobs to go to on Monday mornings? The fireworks finally ended, but by then the mattress felt too warm and cars drove by at intervals with stereos thumping (coming home from the bender, maybe) and it took me ages to get to sleep. This doesn’t happen in winter. Yes, snowblowers are loud, but no one uses them in the middle of the night.
My crankiness about summer and lack of sleep aside, I had a good weekend. I had lunch with Erica on Saturday–she and I used to see each other practically every week and even took some road trips together but then her now-fiancé came into her life and I didn’t see her anymore and barely heard from her, but now she’s resurfaced. I doubt we’ll get back to our former level of closeness, at least not in the next 11 months as she plans her wedding, but it’s good to at least be less isolated than we’ve been from each other. Then Sunday Denise came over and we cut pieces for her next quilt while keeping half an ear and sometimes both eyes on the Univision coverage of the World Cup–we were fortunate to see a goal, even, and that doesn’t happen every game, you know.
