RANDOM THOUGHTS
It's a hot hot, Hot HOT world!
…and I’m sticky, uncomfortable, whiny, and procrastinating.
It is hot — my shorts are just short enough that my legs stick to the stability balance disk I sit on. It is supposed to help my lower back pain by forcing me to use my stabilizing muscles. If it does help, I’d hate to think what would happen if I stopped using it.
But I digress.
The heatwave has been going so long I no longer remember the days not topping 100 degrees F. If you don’t think climate change is happening, I dare you to come live in New Mexico — a state in its 51st year of a 50-year drought (that is the ‘joke’ here in the Bosque). Or stay in my old hometown of Portland, Oregon, and wait for this year’s fire season to turn the air toxic again. I lived in Oregon for 50 years, and only in the last 7 did we have to deal with missed summer days for heat and air quality rather than missed winter days due to snow.
I can’t even remember the last silver thaw I experienced.
But I digress, again.
It is hot — and my days are broken up more than usual keeping everything alive. Everything is hot — even the Sandia peppers in the garden. My chickens are experiencing their first summer — valiantly panting in the heat. I throw them greens and other odds and ends from the kitchen and the garden and keep their water topped up and dampen the ground for them to dust bathe. I’m waiting for my Chicken Biology and Behavior book to arrive before I try anything that would alter their internal body temperature — I’ve read so many +/- reports I’m waiting to read an actual authority before I freeze some corn for them.
Again digressing
But that is the point. It is hard to write when the temp in my studio is 85.4-degrees F — it’s just hard to focus, and even more so after taking a siesta in my 74-degree F bedroom and walking through the 102 degrees F between the buildings. (I always wonder how my partner does it — he just soldiers on. I take a nap, and he goes for a walk in the heat!)
I read an article about how heat in the classroom negatively impacts education for those at the lower end of the financial/social spectrum. Then there was John Oliver’s attempt at shaming Texas and the US for the heat in US prisons.
God the things we do to people.
Everyone deserves Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Temperate Temperatures.
Inner cities are heating up. Even the hottest cities have bizarre disparities between those with water and shady streets and those without water and covered in asphalt and cement, to the tune of a 13.5-degree F difference between neighborhoods in Arizona.
Sitting here sweating and sticky, I realize I have it good — but it still isn’t’ helping me write.
Rant yes. Write? Not so much.
Okay — I have to stop complaining. I’m lucky to live in the Rio Grande Valley, have mature trees, irrigation well, not to mention the money to pay for the air conditioners in the studio and bedroom. Time to buckle down and get to work.
Calgon, take me away!
…to my qazi-medieval town, it is March and the night air is crisp, snow on the ground, and the forges are quiet.
Right… somehow, I set the whole story in a sweltering smith’s forge.
Who says life doesn’t imitate art?
~ Tess
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