Think Like a Mediterranean

First there was the lovely Friday evening beer cafe with the group known as 'the usual suspects', followed by the most sublime Thai garlic eggplant chicken I think I've ever had.  Celebration #1.

Saturday was a splendid day spent outdoors, ending with an another lovely evening spent with some new kids in town going over the best of David Sedaris' audio works, sipping hot coffee and cognac around a big table in the low orange mood lights.  Celebration #2.

Sunday I spent about three or four hours in the strong hot sun with my neighbors' free-ranging chickens acting like housecats and keeping the weeds down.  Other than allowing myself to get much too dehydrated, it was pure Eden, glowing down into sunset and porch time til after 10.

Spring Term 2008 is over, put to bed, now a stack of course materials and textbooks in my living room, and the anxiously awaited grades online tomorrow.  No lingering regrets this time, I am glad to wrap this term up, so I can go back to focusing on why I'm back in school in the first place; to savor the whole experience, not hoping it's over as soon as possible.  Like being washed up on Trigonometry Island with just a box of damp matches.

Summer Term is one big Time Machine, Oregon history and two Ancient Greek Civilization classes to finish out my transfer student requirements.  I've seen the syllabus for one 400-level class and there's a 12 page research paper due with a pre-approval bibliography submission.  What have I done?  The Fall Term will finish off the Greeks and bring in the Egyptians, Sumerians and pre-Greek Macedonians.  What does any of this have to do with anthropology?

Well---not much really, but I needed some electives to fill out, and there weren't many anth. classes offered this summer, most of the department is going to be doing field work in the archaeology aspect of the field, and I needed to stick around to work and stay in school.  Maybe next year.

Needing to stay disciplined to take an online class should prove a challenge, I've never taken one before that wasn't some kind of corporate training of brief duration.  So this slides right in to the porch time, why not, better than caged in a classroom from 3:30 on every afternoon for a month.  Out on the porch, laptop and books and pretending my tomatoes are really growing and becoming my nectar and ambrosial lunch. 

Can't discuss tomatoes now, I wasn't planing on crying this early in the day.

Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."

Start of Porch Season

At last, ma cherie, it is time for the languid and curried hours of porch love---oh, how we have missed you, fickle mistress, during your endless stay in your sister Persephone's guest cottage in Hades, finally over until October.

Yet you taunt us in February, a lozenge of warmth from two until five on a Wednesday afternoon, only to flit off again with the giggle of a teenage girl--so cruel, yet so delicious. It helped me remember the winter sun in the tropics, also gold and cool, burnishing the world with an amber glow before suddenly slipping away behind a man-o-war cloud.

In March there were a few false starts, one splendid stretch on a Saturday afternoon that tanned the tops of my feet, and I succumbed to the decadence completely by dozing off for an hour or so. My anxiety was gently treated by these brief embraces and promises of an extended stay soon, perhaps with your next visit. My role as the porch priestess was to keep the watch for the first hint of clear blue skies after one pm, have some urgent reading material ready, some cold and refreshing liquid tribute accessible, and position the solar seating at the correct angle to the position of the sun. I take my duties seriously.

Finally, Enchanted April, as you began to venture away from your winter digs more frequently, dragging out those last damp goodbyes with the Hades', with some hail and sideways freezing rainy days tossed in just because you can, because your games always turn out so beautifully in May, because you know we can't help ourselves that we love you, tolerate the infidelity each fall, and will always make ready the best chambers in our hearts for you. That first day-long picnic with you in May, those endless warm days in June reading poetry from the inside of my eyelids to you while I hover in the still blue air---I live for this, and you know it.

Why do I fight you? So silly of me, but there is work for me to do, tasks of living with my feet on the ground that must be done, reading and cleaning and working for that coin and paper that mean so much down here. But you don't understand, you are the ultimate source of energy, of light, what makes everything else go.

I know it. And left the tropics in spite of it, and there are rare times when I remember that day of my first summer there, in early July, when the humidity was so high, and I had no shadow standing by that giant fuschia bouganvilla. I looked around and the sky was bleached white, there was no blue, yet no clouds at all, the light was coming from right over my head and pressed down like a white-hot anvil, the only shadows were lying deep under a giant banyan grove across the white coral dirt alley. There wasn't even a breath of air or breeze, the palm fronds hung heavy and slack like sweaty hands. Nothing moved, the white heat shimmered and I could feel my bones melting. Complete seduction, I was now forever a servant to the rays of the sun and follower of the changing light.

Heliocentric

Whatever I'm doing, whenever it is, if there's a sustained sunbreak, I drop my piddling little task and bolt for the outside. It's just time for winter to be finally over, and time to sit on the porch in something other than black solar-magnet clothes to ward off the chill while waiting for the blaze.

How funny is it that in Astronomy class we are studying the Sun, being tantalized by films of solar flares, boiling radiance of the photosphere, waving heat coronas in eclipse---and I get to walk home from the bus in sideways frozen rain. Brrrr.

The astonishing thing lately is that I am starting to begin to understand some of this trigonometry.
The calculator I bought has helped, and the professor is focusing more on the 'what' instead of the 'how', but neat pieces of this whole snarl of Greek letters, exponents and subsets are falling into place. Slowly, I should add, so as not to challenge the Math Gods with my arrogance.

There are all these websites to visit with animations of a full day's Sun rotation, seeing sunspot frequency, the granulations of convection cells rising to the surface and cooling (to 5 million degrees Kelvin) and sinking back under the surface to be reheated. In the presentation, there are all these cooking and stove analogies, and who knew that neutrinos came in three flavors?
During the break after the first hour of class, I saw my face in the ladies room mirror, and I looked sunburned.

This is the official Midterm week, and I just found out today I am getting an aid package for the summer term that starts the end of June. It's what I was hoping would work out, to stay at it and make up for some of all the lost time. Hopefully, there's going to be something offered that I want to take, now that I'm committed. Until the summer schedule is posted, I hover in the mysterious cloud of unknowing. Flirting with the sun.

Last Chance, Sundance

*sigh*


Such high hopes for harvest, such dwindling results, and I'm talking tomatoes now.

Seven plants.

Planted the end of April, that caught all those sunny and hot May days, tenderly staked & watered.

I was planning on washtubs of salsa, pasta sauce, mountains of BLTs, maybe even a little table with a sign, "Heirloom Slicers, $2.00 a bag".

Maybe next year.

I'm taking the AC unit out of the window today, putting the box fans into the crawl space along with the AC, and switching out the duvet cover to the one that's already faded on one side from the reappearing southern sun in the bedroom windows. Moving the feline Lido Sun Deck of their permanent life-time cruise closer to the heater, and folding all the sleeveless shirts and assigning them to the back of the closet. Sweater Sniff-Test 101: Hint of Tresor perfume? Not cleaned since being laid off. Mrs. Meyers' Lemon Verbena and woolly? Recently handwashed, okay to hang in the closet. Where's my leather jacket now? How did I accumulate all these scarves? And how come it still isn't enough? Time to start another pair of fingerless gloves in some of that new Noro yarn? (calm down)

Summer's over in more ways than one. I am excited to be going into Fall (or Q3 & Q4 as we used to say) without thinking of it as The Holiday Build. I am hoping to perhaps enjoy this strange winter time habit of gift-giving and over eating that you earthlings call The Holidays.
I found my large gift bag of Christmas CDs that I took to the store every year, right on the floor in the living room closet where I heaved it in January, and I didn't even cringe. That's progress!

Sunwise, we're where we were in March, Equinox time, and continually working our way back again to December and Winter Solstice. This is how we Porch Worshippers calculate time, where is the Sun and when? Imagine trying to ripen tomatoes outside in the sun in March. You see why I despair. Thanks to my friendly neighbor Kathy, the solar domes are working their magic on the partly sunny and overcast days, but when it's full-on sunshine, I run out there and pull them off, do my Ripening Ritual Dance, then run inside before the police arrive.

This past spring, as the sun strengthened and the days lengthened, I felt less and less like working and more and more into seeking---answers, alternatives, peace of mind, perspectives, my current state of being. Autumn brings me back into wanting to get busy, languid is over, my mind sharpens, my hands are restless, I need a brisk walk, the day needs to be scheduled and the To Do List is no longer the TA-DA List, because now it's detailed and lengthly. It sounds almost like Boss Lady is back, and that may be so, in such a way that I am roping my own stray cattle in, that roamed all summer in the tall grass. Those green tomatoes are in for some serious discipline in their ripening attitude.

Fast Forward 20 Years

This week I met the woman I want to be in 20 years.

I acted casual, easy-going, all that laid-back stuff I do so well. But my brain was spinning like a cold fusion cube, and the high ceilings with ochre paint treatments, oil paintings, narrow french doors and old-growth timber floors were wavering and rippling around me. Had to plotz for a sec.

Old historic spaces do this to me frequently, but then also meeting this kindly multi-talented woman who owns this oasis just shot me into the Never-Never Land of Potential Future Lives.

What in the world do I do now? and a little voice said, "just what you are doing already, dear"

A few posts back, I was winge-ing on about a former employee, not calling her back, etc. Bad me. So I finally emailed her, telling her how busy I am in my new careers, starting a new project, happy happy happy, gotta go. Not only did she call about the old days in our store, she was calling because she is going to be running a seasonal kiosk for our old employer this fall and winter in our old mall storefront, and she's looking for former co-workers to work for her. I may screen all my calls until February. Talk about going backwards...

Not interested. Not even a smidge. Work for her for $8 an hour. Not happening.

That would be re-wind 10 years.

Fired off a fast email to my pal and former asst. mgr. Linsey, "Heads UP!" and all that, and reminded her she would still make more using up the rest of her unemployment than going back to that situation. "No worries!" she said, "I wished her luck and told her I might be by to get a 2008 calendar."

So the take-away here is that once you've done all the mental earth-moving to step forward into your new life, going backwards just isn't an option. Because then you are being buried alive. And I don't think that's too bleak an assessment, because of all the people I've worked with and known well who felt squeezed and took the familiar step back, and then within a week, knew it was wrong, and were kicking themselves hard to numb the regret.
Keep growing, keep moving, forge ahead, stretch out, learn a new skill, surprise yourself with another thing you do well. You'll meet new people who will enrich your life, and being bored or tolerating hours of crazy-making drama will fade and be forgotten. Get outside and enjoy this wonderful gentle late summertime to re-charge, and dive back into your new stream.

Belly Full of Beans

Another rapturous morning moment spent in the local Garden of Eden, surveying how the midnight rain refreshed K & H's plantings. So I can be forgiven for grazing on some tender green beans while singing to cats and other Deva garden spirits? I'm keeping your Mojo going while y'all are away. There's plenty of time and many sunny days ahead to replenish your stock by the time you get back. Then I returned home to water the porch planters that were teased by the rain but got no love, and then polished off a few handfuls of gold and red cherry toms. I like this hunter-gatherer stuff. This was truly a Breakfast of Champions.

The tide has turned on this summer, it is really noticeable in the evenings now. Not being one of those folks who hungers for autumn anymore, I am hanging on to this cooler and gentler summer for dear life, the green that lasted throughout, the earth unscorched for a change. Maybe we in the Willamette Valley can slide slowly slowly into a two month Indian summer, some spicy notes, some golden hints in the trees, lots of southern sloping sunshine and crisp blue skies, liquid honey sunsets. No rains, no frosts, no permaclouds, no gray windows, not until November anyway. The tomatoes can last that long without frosts, the ones that were on their way to ripening before the sun fell away. I wish.

This year we are thinking about enclosing the porch with the kind of panels that come down in the spring, so the front porch is another room for all but the coldest winter days. Keeping the cold winds out, and letting the warming sunshine through, almost like a public house biergarten.
What else would we be doing out there in the cold? There are three home brews on the schedule---Rubus Maximus, a ruby IPA for our girl Rhubarb romping in the Elysium Fields;
Zephyr Golden Ale, beautifully clear and bright, but packs a wallop; and Bruno Bitter IPA, a dark and robust strong flavored brew with a handsome head. This Autumn will see us swimming in hoppy heaven, so if you are on your way over and hear Jimmy Buffett's live CD and people singing along to "Cheeseburger in Paradise"---you're at the wrong house. But park any where you find a space.

From my window this heavy gray bank of clouds looks like snow, as we used to say in Michigan. Coming from the coast, they look like waves and waves rolling in on the black sand. Two blocks over I can see the top of a maple tree already beginning to go gold the top three feet. This is a huge Japanese maple with small leaves that look like baby dragon feet, and it turns earlier than any other tree in the neighborhood. More accurate than a calendar, with black bark like wrought iron fingers, the tree hovers for a few days as a glowing lantern, before they all fall at once. Sure enough, it's usually the third week of September, and the other trees seem to take the cue.

Not such great weather for the Hawthorne Street Faire this weekend, however. Cool is okay, chilly and rainy is not. Dang. Lots of pedestrians the past few days, and the street renovation is officially done (fanfare) with new crosswalks that drivers still zoom through, and two more lights to snarl up 5pm traffic. I love it that the #14 is a straight shot downtown, but it takes 45 minutes during rush hour to get between downtown and 39th St or vice-versa. So let's add a few more lights...But I digress. Since the turnout at House of Vintage might not be what we all planned on, I hope once the sun returns this coming week, the newly arriving college kids needing STUFF will come here and stock up on funky with mom & dad's SUV to take it back to the pad. Forget about that Scandinavian Nightmare by the airport, don't go! Don't conform!

Keep the Local Love Happening, my brothers and sisters. Peace.

Post Script to Jasmine Trees in August

Tuesday night I dreamt that I was having a little party at my house. There was music playing, and my lovely neighbors were over, and there was a large table loaded with platters of food. We had all of the windows and doors opened, and the party was spilling out onto the yard and the porch, I could smell meat cooking and wood smoke. I was happy. I looked around at all my friends, all of these wonderful people who I did not know until I moved to Portland, and just in the last few years we had entered each others' lives. We were all laughing and talking, glasses in hand, smiles and friendly faces, like a classic Woody Allen film. Here I was, in the midst of a party in which I felt completely at home, relaxed, blessed with such good people around me, genuinely enjoying myself and reflecting that I loved my life here.

The doorbell rang. Which was odd, because everyone was just walking in casually, calling hello and coming into the center of the house with bottles of wine and dishes to pass. Who would stand on ceremony and ring the bell, staying outside?

I walked through the groups of friends chatting and eating, picking my way from the back to the front of the house and into the vestibule. The wooden door was open, but the screen door was not. Standing there on the porch with a timid smile and sparkling eyes, a mohair shawl around her statuesque shoulders, was my sister-friend, looking very much as she did 20 years ago, rounder, warmer, and with beaded cornrows in her thick chesnut hair. We hugged for what seemed like hours, standing there in the doorway, and it just felt so healing to my heart, that she was back in my life. The way she was before, during those early years we were so fierce and loyal, to the death and beyond, always seeing the grace and the beauty. In my ear she said, "Are you glad that I came?" and I just let the tears roll down onto her shoulder and held her tighter.

Jasmine Trees In August

It stops me in my tracks, transfixed and speechless. I wait for the full depth and complexity of the perfume to take hold, a split second of timelessness that unlocks so much from my heart. Sometimes I tear up, other times I smile with eyes half-closed, but I always stop whatever I'm doing and wait for the moment to fully bloom and then fade to merely a fragrance again. Looking around, I locate the Jasmine tree and make a mental note of who's yard it's in, how far it is from where I live and where I was going, and if the tree is a magnificent specimen or a parking strip treasure. Usually I continue on with what I was doing, although a little distracted.

Naturally there's a story with this, and since it has many layers, I am still loosening the knots of it and trying to see the larger pattern and beauty of it, and my part in it, good and bad. Taking a deep breath, I almost want to start by saying, "Once upon a time---" again, the people taking on archetypal roles, our behavior now mythical, our failures tragedies. And it would all be true, but my usual tactic, so I won't paint the larger than life mural story, surrounded with Jasmine trees.

When I first moved to Portland, I stayed at some friends' house for a few days before my stuff from Florida arrived and I moved into my apartment. They had this huge leafy tree shading their house in their neighbors' yard, and it was just beginning to flower. The tree kept their house cool all summer long, and then in August, bloomed profusely with little star-shaped flowers that smelled like your Auntie's jasmine perfume from long ago. I took this as a magical sign of the rightness of my decision to relocate here, jasmine being one of my absolute favorites.
An entire tree, just casually blooming in the heat of summer, not spring, and making a cool lazy sanctuary of my friends' bungalow, where I spent hours and hours that first month just getting my head around the idea I was actually here, in Portland. On the Pacific Ocean side of the country. Everything about that first month here, in August 2000, in that house with those two people, is carried along by the perfume of that tree in my mind. Having meals with them after work, sitting on the back deck in the long evenings talking in the dark, taking refuge from the sun and heat on a Saturday afternoon with all the windows open and the wind chimes playing, talking and laughing and loving every moment of being there, being here, finally. I truly believed it would stay that way, and would never ever be any different.

That's why the perfume overtakes me on the street, I'm flooded with all of this, all at once.

Because everything changed, of course. And I'm still making sense of it. I think there was one pivotal moment, for me anyway, but there were a few years of bewilderment and uncertainty when I put my best face forward when I saw them, and tried to figure out what was going wrong. My friends split up, sort of, and I worked too much, and the commute was way too long, and I was stressed over money and store politics, and she moved further away, and and and...
It all came apart. Almost 25 years in, everything unraveled. My heart was broken and I grieved for a long time. Work more, feel less. Finally this past winter, even that structure was broken beyond repair.

This summer I feel her absence in a way that I didn't allow myself to before. I wish she could see my life now, what I am now, how I live now. This is how she always envisioned me living before, all those years we were sisters and best friends, and I was scared to death to be an artist. She knew I could do it, and that is a comfort to me these days, like the Jasmine trees in August and the smell of antique roses and timber creaking in the hot sunshine. She was the main reason I came out here, and that is her greatest gift to me.

Last week I drove past the house and slowed way down. There it was, nothing changed, and the Jasmine tree shading half the neighborhood and looking so majestic, the canopy over 50ft tall. The windows in her old room were open, and I could see the same pale green paint on the edge of the wall.

You can be in two places at the same time.

Storms & Earthquakes

Quite the week for weather. If you can call a 3.2 earthquake weather.

I was asked if I felt it here in Southeast, and I had to say, I didn't. I was home, watching TV. And since I usually do notice the little house doing the magic fingers dance, I was surprised that I didn't notice it this time.

"What were you watching?" came next.
"Uh---okay, I'll tell you. Turner Classic Movies had on 'Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill', and I had never seen it before, it was rather absorbing."
"You're kidding."

It's good to get caught up on the cult film millieu, now I'll get the tossed off references to it, and it made me laugh. I just kept thinking, "My dad in his 20s would have loved this movie at the drive-in, I wonder if he saw it?" Cars, broads, racing, crime spree, ridiculous dialogue, really heavy eyeliner and cleavage from sea to shining sea. I get that from him, appreciation of the ridiculous I mean.

So I missed the earthquake. But the heavy summer thunderstorm last night was an utter delight. The build-up of humidity, the darkening horizon and distant flashes, the hovering silence in the trees, then the faint scent of mossy lakeside as first one then a dozen loud drops come down like ball bearings. There wasn't much wind, and only distant lightning and thunder, but we did have a great show from the second story windows, and a few washes of rain before it was all over. And you might expect it to cool off after the storm blew through, but it didn't until a few hours later, when some wind rose and carried off some of the heat and humidity of the day.
Freshly damp summer pavement. Nothing else smells like that. I slept like a brick.

Being cloudy and cool, I get a break from watering duties today, and the local weather dudes say the 100 degree days are over for now. Between the earthquake, heat waves, storms, fires, and ping-pong sized hail, one is looking skyward and expecting locusts, frogs, flies, and other biblical type special effects. I mean, I don't, but to hear people marvel at it, you'd think these things never happened at all until the last 10 years.
Of course, it all happened, we just didn't have 84 gazillion news sources yammering at us 24-7 to whip us up into a frenzy.

A sudden summer thunderstorm here in Oregon is unusual, and I enjoyed it. In the other hot place I used to live, they are violent, frequent, and cause unexpected flooding, and your power goes out all the time. We not only took them for granted, funnel clouds, water spouts and hurricanes made us all amateur meteorologists. Like here we all talk about gardening. Or coffee. Or microbrews. Or athletic shoes.

While I was out watering yesterday morning, a group of neighbors and their elderly visiting family strolled by, and they commented on the lush strip gardens by the street, and all the spent roses in everyone's garden. "What you folks here need is a good rain!" said one of the older men. "Not til September," I said.
I think I'm going to start rain dancing when I'm out with the hose. If I have on one of my tie-dyed t-shirts, you'll know it's me. Say "Hi!".

Getting Ready For 100 Degrees

At least it's not humid, I keep reminding myself. And there are no hurricanes. Or thunderstorms and lightning, for that matter. But---there is no air conditioning, either. After having spent 7 summers here in Portland, I am still amazed at the lack of AC around here. Not complaining about my landlady here, I found a tidy window unit at Freds for under a $100, and it keeps me from jumping out the window at over 95.

I know I have to explain that in Florida, people have central air, maybe not heaters so much, but compressor units the size of municipal mailboxes behind their houses. The humidity makes this necessary, because I'd really rather not have to describe how mold and mildew take over if you don't have it. It's part of the modern house and shop or car, like having electricity or cash registers. It is not an option. All cars have it as a standard feature. Like a steering wheel. It dries the sweat you worked up just walking between the car and the door of anywhere you're going and keeps you from looking like a wet tissue paper party favor.

So my inquiring thought is---after at least 7 straight summers of weeks over 90 and days over 100 on a predictable basis, let's bite the bullet y'all and get air conditioning. What is the issue here? Is it energy usage? Okay, fair enough question. The Energy Star sheet that came with my low end window model says that it would cost only $34 a year if I ran it for 750 hours. That's 10 hours a day for 60 days, plus another 10 days at 15 hours a day. That would be from mid-June until the end of August. Not even close to how infrequently I use it in July and August, but for my personal comfort, it is well worth the one time cost of $100 and then $35 each summer to be comfortable when it's this hot. People spend more than that for a weekend at the coast, ONE WEEKEND. Gimmie the AC!

Okay, so I took care of my own personal at-home comfort. What is everyone else waiting for? I don't get it, is this a homesteader thing, "my covered wagon hard-assed ancestors wore long woolen underwear and long skirts all summer long, I don't need no stinkin' city-folk air conditioning" kind of tough man contest? I even have an east facing sleeping porch, so I know these tough wagoneers had good sense and built for hot days as best they could. And I'm lucky enough to have a downright chilly finished basement, but my suite is on the top floor, I prefer to have the cool air up thar. We have the technology, y'know? We spend thousands on computer and phone and internet stuff, maybe AC is too low tech, more an appliance and not sexy enough.

The summer 4 years ago I spent days and days after work going from the bathtub filled with cold water to the lawn chair set up in my living room with beach towels and a fan, I thought, "Our esteemed President may be in denial about climate change, but I know he's not sitting in the Oval Office in a damp lawn chair and a wet bathing suit spread-eagled in front of a box fan," and I resolved to get me an air conditioner before the next June rolled to the front. And I did.
I love it, and it works for me even better when I park it on the north side of the house. The other supplies I picked up along the way were icy cold mint shampoo soap and cooler freeze packs, for the neck, lower back and behind the knees, just in case the compressor freezes up. It's only the size of a microwave, not Florida-caliber, but it does the trick. And the Dr Bronner's Peppermint will hit it hard, especially washing your hair and leaving it in a few minutes too long----what headache?
So I'm ready, planned my strategy, and think that seedless watermelon diet is the best idea for the next few days.
Even my favorite yarn store "Yarn Garden" got AC a few years ago! I mean, c'mon!!