heat of the day

It must be summer as I bought my first watermelon yesterday (it's chillin' for the killin') and am having my first iced coffee this morning.

Our temps are in the hundreds lately and I spend a lot of time indoors during the day. Siestas are for real, because then I have the energy to stay up for the night's coolth. The nights are the only reason the days are tolerable.

Now, some people just love the heat and get out and exercise and garden and sweat in it with genuine delight (or insanity). However, I've had enough sun exposure for my entire life and then some, so daylight finds me under cover whenever possible.

I moved to the panhandle of Florida in my early 20's and just figured I'd get tan since I lived there (typical 20-something logic). Nature vs. nurture indeed! My ancestral DNA is Scots/German; prefers cloud cover, fog, or rain; and anything over 75 degrees is considered a heat wave. Yet here I am in the desert.

When I moved here in 1986 I was taken by the open-mindedness of the place. I was just another white chick with dreadlocks, not the jaw-dropping event I had been in the "redneck riviera" of Pensacola. I actually was part of a little bi-racial tribe of dreadlocked men women and children--10 of us in all--and we did create a stir in the local K-Mart when we'd arrive for a shopping expedition. Ha.

Tucson was a clean clear break from the cloying heat and mentality I'd come from in the southeast, plus a great place to start over as a newly-single mother. I also loved being able to see the mountains all the time; it gave me the same vastness of feeling I'd experienced at the Gulf coast (minus the palmetto bugs).

As my dad said when he came here for his first visit, "It's wild and wide-open and free out here, just like you!"

Yay Dad!


Meanwhile--yesterday on the way to the river for our morning outing, Angus FELL OUT OF THE BACK WINDOW while I was driving down the street at 25-30 mph. This little guy is going to be one accident/illness/near miss after another, isn't he?

He was able to run to me as soon as I stopped and got out and called him, but was shaken up enough to poop on me a little as soon as I got him back in the car on my lap. He's got a fat bottom lip but otherwise seems completely fine and even oblivious to the fact that he's escaped death and/or serious injury 4 times already in his 3+ months of life....some kind of odds huh?

ciao for now....