Wicked hot

It's been wicked hot here since Friday. Usually on the few days a year that this area gets hot, we get coastal fog by nightfall to cool it all back down again, and those days are usually at least in August if not September or October. July in SF is famously the coldest winter Mark Twain ever spent. Usually we joke about July coming, better get out the wool sweaters. Not this month! It got up to 94 inside, 99 outside, and cooled only to 89 at night, three nights in a row and counting. I know that doesn't sound so bad to people in many areas, but what you have to realize is that we don't have air conditioners around here, so when it does get this hot, there's very little we can do about it. I was glad the July opera was over, because it was 105-115 in the tunnel suburbs.

Actually, office buildings and the wealthy people in their McMansions have air conditioning, and the power draw usually causes brownouts or rolling blackouts when we get heat waves. The utilities then beg us all to "Flex our power" and only run appliances after sunset and before sunup. They rarely mention that the wealthy should turn down their air conditioners. We sweltering hoi polloi are supposed to wash our dishes by hand and do laundry after bedtime so that the McMansions can stay cool. Right. I think instead of having rolling blackouts, they should just throttle the amount of electricity available to each home as needed, and each home can allocate its share as desired. Maybe if the McMansioners realized that their air conditioning and refrigerators were mutually exclusive choices, they'd set the AC higher than 65. And just think, the general population might finally figure out the relationships between volts, watts, and amps!

While I'm ranting, why is it that the people who think AC needs to be set at 65 are also the people who think furnaces need to be set at 75? And how come the people with the flags on their SUVs are also the people who can't be bothered to vote?)

Heat waves make me cranky.

Anyway, Saturday we woke up hot and miserable, and it didn't take me long to declare it a desperate time calling for desperate measures and mix up a batch of Danish Marys, which helped. At 3pm it was all I could do to force myself outside and light the grill to roast a chicken. Fortunately, it tasted pretty good. We were dousing ourselves in cold water several times an hour, and by the end of the day we'd gone through a gallon of iced tea and all the ice in our freezer, which is saying something when you have an ice machine.

We tried to take Candy for an afternoon walk but only got about two houses away before we had to give up--it was just too hot to move, and since she'd pooped, we just turned around and promised her a proper walk after dark. After dark it was still too hot, though, so none of us got any significant exercise Saturday.

Yesterday we woke up hot and miserable for the third day in a row and went out to buy fans. I've lived here since 1994 and never needed anything more than a wimpy little oscillating tabletop fan that I'd brought from Chicago. I don't remember even using that fan since moving to Montclair for anything but ventilating rooms with fresh paint or tile lacquer, and after the kitchen project, it was so gunky and bedraggled, I finally threw it away. However, all three critters had been doing their dead horse impressions since Friday and it was starting to worry me, so we went and bought two high-power fans for them. They've been roaring on high ever since.

We also got a sprinkler for Candy, and when we got home we stripped down a layer and took her out to play in it. V and I loved it, but Candy had to be dragged and stood there with this look of despair or at least resignation. I swear, though, she appreciated when she went back inside to flop on her pillow all wet with the fan blowing on her. She looked perky and alert for the first time in days. We also felt much better and went out with the newspaper and our wet clothes to the back deck. We decided a bucket of icy water was a nice place to keep our feet. Norton begged to come out, so I dunked his paws in the icy water several times, too. He didn't appreciate that at all, but I swear it did him some good. Gjetost, meanwhile, had retreated to the coolest, darkest corner of the house: my office, behind the milkcrates under my desk. Once we realized she was missing, it took us quite a panicky ten minutes or so to find her!

We made a cold dinner and sat down to watch a movie at 8. By the end of the movie, V pointed out that cool air was coming in, so we took Candy on her walk and felt gleeful. You know it's hot out when 85 feels like a cool breeze. She had fun growling at a couple raccoons.

Now's about the time I realized our refrigerator/freezer needed to be turned down--it was 50 in the fridge and 25 in the freezer, so that helped explain why we'd emptied the ice supply two days in a row. Poor thing just wasn't keeping up.

Here we are, day four, and it's 83 inside and 87 outside already at 10:30am. Not good.

Over the winter, we had 100-year-record rainfall, and now our supposedly coldest month is the hottest I've been through since moving to California. It's beyond me how anyone can deny that global warming is happening.

In better news, that record rainfall seems to be promising a bumper crop of Montclairberries. Before it got quite so blisteringly hot, I harvested the first big load, and we started macerating three bucketsful of the family product--one rum, two vodka. Montclairberry Slurpees are in our future.