Contemplating 102F from the 70F perspective

The forecast: Sunny and 102

The context: I spent the first 12+ years of my life on the beautiful Oregon Coast, where if it's sunny it's also very windy, and where my mom defined 60 degrees as "swimming weather." If it made it all the way up to 60, she'd take us to the pool. (Their forecast, 60 miles west of here, is just 70 today. Do try the link; it's got a nice automated slide show.) Whenever we'd visit my grandparents in Lebanon in the summer (Lebanon, Oregon, that is; about 40 miles north of here, near Albany and Corvallis), it might be 80 or more in the summer, and I completely wilted. Very few houses in the Willamette Valley have air conditioning. 5% maybe? After all, it only gets to 90 maybe a dozen times a year. But... *trumpets blow a fanfare* we have one of them! And with the element of choice involved, I've gotten quite fond of basking in 80-85 degree air, in fact.

The trouble is, today is Work on Papers Day, and now I need to find a quiet and cool spot to work that won't involve (a) sticking around the nice cool house, because D. and K. will be noisily present, or (b) driving in my car, because no way am I getting into that thing in the late afternoon in this heat. Even my horoscope says I need to find some place quiet to work today, with no disturbances. Too bad I don't still have a key to the Unitarian library. Hmm.

(Some sort of buzzing insect is apparently making its home inside the outer bedroom wall about four feet from here, and it's making the eeriest sounds in there...)

If it's 102 at 4 p.m., it'll get hotter before it gets cooler...

It was quite nice outside in the late morning, despite the heat. D. and I went to the playground at the French school, which has some new and very creative equipment, and then on a "hike" on the Amazon Headwaters path, where we ate some early (and quite sour) blackberries. (He likes them sour, fortunately.) I then brought him home to play with his auntie and left to work on my papers, after going to the store where, yay, I got carded! The woman carding me couldn't have been more than 25 herself, which is flattering.

My attempts to work in a quiet, shady spot have had mixed results. That is, both places were fine, but both stopped being shady, and now it's 102 degrees out and I'm hiding from the heat, in my dimly lit, cool bedroom. First I sat in some shade on the big lawn at the neighborhood schools, where I wrote a plan for new analyses to revise one paper and reviewed my outline for another paper and decided I was nearly ready to draft the introduction, but then the shade from the forest behind me disappeared and I went walking all around the schools looking for a good work surface. I then remembered the "secret park" about 5 blocks NW of my house (I was now about 5 blocks SE), and got in the car to drive there. It was 130 degrees in the car! I survived the drive, and the secret park was perfect, its single picnic table clean and shaded, and the mating swallowtail butterflies only a minor distraction. I wrote three pages of a third paper (the one that most interests me), longhand (or to be more accurate, in nasty illegible scribble). This tiny park really would be perfect for writing on a more normal day, but after about an hour, the sun moved out from behind a ponderosa pine and I was in trouble. So I got back in the car with a fantasy of driving down to the shopping center and getting a soda with ice in it, but it was 140 in the car at this point, and when it took me about 10 seconds to recognize the nearest main street, I realized this was not good, and I drove home. I downed a bunch of water and a very juicy nectarine, and now, back to work.