Saturday 10 July 2010

the Heat

I hate the heat.  I can't get rid of it.  I have no idea why people pay big money to lie on hot sand under hot sun being hot.  The water I get.  It's not hot.  In winter, I don't bother wearing a coat or gloves or anything, if I'm only walking out to my car and driving it (heated) to work, and then walking into a heated building.  The coat simply doesn't make that much difference (if you're wearing a coat in Canada in January, you're still cold, of course.  It doesn't stop you from being cold.  It slows down your freezing to death if you stay outside for too long).  And I forget them everywhere if I do wear them.

I don't get coffee and tea.  They are hot.  To relax I like to drink something cooling, not something that burns my tongue, and I can tell you, if you're a regular coffee or tea drinker, I would have to repeatedly burn off the outer layer of skin on my tongue before it stopped burning.  As for me, I wish water and other drinkable stuff froze at a lower temperature, so that when I poured chilled Red Bull over ice in a frosty stein that's been in the freezer, it didn't start turning to slush.  My sister buys drinks of all kinds, and even does neat stuff like buy two frozen juice concentrate flavours, mix them with Perrier and then...leave them on the counter all day in the middle of July so they are lukewarm and sticky and hour later.  And then she drinks them!  It's like people who prefer lukewarm Diet Coke to nonDiet, chilled and on ice.  Huh?  Evidence of life from other planets.

It has been very hot here, in Canada, this week and last.  92F/33C a lot of the time.  I was pretty certain I was feeling hot, so I checked weather reports so I could know for sure.  Quite a bit hotter here outside of Canada's capital than Mexico City or L.A.  Hotter than Miami, Florida.  Only slightly hotter here than in Marrakesh, Morocco (in Africa).  

How to deal with this when the air conditioner is too old to bother installing?  Well, the apartment is, of course, extremely clothing optional at this time, and the blender is out making fruit smoothies and Orange Juliuses of various fruits I have purchased, all the live-long day, rather than cooking meals.  (I used to use my blender once, and then bemoan for a week afterward that now it had dried stuff encrusted in it, and that I didn't have a dishwasher, and that it was awkward and actually pretty hard to clean.  Now I know that, as soon as you've used the blender, you can pour hot water and a bit of dish soap into it and run it, making it its own dishwasher.)  And I don't move much.  Mostly I make smoothies and watch reruns of The West Wing and Weeds.  And plan recording more music.  Acoustic piano seems like something I could add.  

As I wait for the heat misery to end, I find it gradually starts getting less miserable.  I might actually be getting used to it being equatorial in here, at least for a few weeks.  I was messing about earlier with running stuff I recorded long ago through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet to see what that sounded like (electronic keyboard sounds, backwards guitar sounds, harmony vocals, conga drum bits, bass guitar, you name it).

4 comments:

paula said...

wear a wet shirt?

Wikkid Person said...

"the apartment is, of course, extremely clothing optional at this time (and the blender is out making fruit smoothies and Orange Juliuses of various fruits I have purchased)"

paula said...

oh, wet clothes keep you much, much cooler than wearing nothing.

Wikkid Person said...

Thanks for the tip. I'll take your word for that, assuming you've had success with the latter strategy and found it superior to the former one. One concern: I don't really want to squelch around leaving wet stains on my furniture. It's already very humid in here. I did find that running cold water over your hands and then not drying them, so the water would evaporate, worked well. And the drinking fruit smoothies filled with chipped ice was good too.