I realize I've been avoiding this blog because I DON'T HAVE MY CAMERA and I've forgotten how to blog without photos. For the first week I guess I thought the police were actually going to find my camera, but now I guess I think they won't. Still, I'm dawdling about buying a new one. Canon doesn't make my model anymore, they make 50,000 other models, and it's very hard to choose. Rocket Boy tried to buy a used one on eBay today, exactly like my old one, but he didn't get it. So no photos for now.
But I was drawn back into posting anyway because it's SO HOT here, and I'm just really tired of summer. And it's only August 6th. Ridgecrest stays mighty hot through August, September, and October, though October is more likely to be in the 90s than the 100s. For the next five days, NWS is currently predicting that Ridgecrest will be 109, 109, 111, 110, and 111. To make myself feel better, I look at the predicted temps for Death Valley for the same time period: 121, 122, 124, 126, and 125. Yes, I KNOW it's a dry heat, but it's a YUCKY dry heat.
Meal planning has become impossible. I don't want to turn on the oven, I don't want to go to the grocery store, and I don't want to cook. Fortunately, Rocket Boy and the twins are being very accommodating. If I can put one food item on the table (and I'm using the term "food" loosely here) around dinnertime, they'll eat it and not complain. Tonight we had Trader Joe's canned lentil soup (excellent!) with crackers. Tomorrow I'm thinking about a tuna salad. Wednesday... well, that's a long time from now.
On Sunday we took our quarrelsome children to a movie at the Ridgecrest Cinemas (Ice Age: Continental Drift -- much too scary for four-year-olds) and afterwards walked across the parking lot to Beansters/Pizza Factory, where we got coffee drinks and cookies. It was only 3 pm, but we decided that would be dinner. But then of course at 5:30 pm, the boys started asking "Mom, what would be the dinner?" "We already had it," I said, but they were not convinced. And then the doorbell rang, and it was a boy delivering at box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts that I had purchased a week or two ago from a little girl who came to the door (it was in support of something, maybe a cheerleading group). So I put the box of doughnuts on the table and it became dinner. I felt sick the rest of the evening, but hey. And RB fortunately took the rest of the box to work with him this morning. RB is a very helpful sort of husband in that way, kind of like a garbage disposal.
On the plus side, the laundry on the clothesline dries very quickly. On the minus side, hot water comes out of the cold tap. On the plus side, you don't have to wait for the shower water to heat up. On the minus side, it's too hot to push the twins to daycare in their stroller and thus I keep getting fatter (having Krispy Kreme doughnuts show up at the door is not helping either). Also on the minus side, my tomato and pepper plants do not have ANY fruit on them. The tomato keeps making flowers, the pepper just makes leaves. I fertilize them every week. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I think it's also just too hot.
Desert heat really is different from a humid heat. You don't sweat much in desert heat, because it just lifts all the moisture out of your body. When I went out after dinner tonight to bring in the scorched laundry I was horrified by the heat. "Yuck!" I said to no one in particular. But sweat didn't drip down my thighs. I just felt like I was being baked, like a cookie.
Well, time for bed. We turn off the A/C at night and set up a fan to draw hot air into the house and blow the previously air-conditioned air over to our neighbor's house. I don't know why we do this. One of the mysteries of the desert.
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