Friday, July 20, 2012

Adjusting and Boiling

Life seems to have slowed to a lazy, unproductive crawl around our little house.  Maybe it's just an adjustment period -- getting settled into a lack of "enforced" routine as I start out my first season of retirement.

Maybe it's a lack of initiative on my part -- facing cleaning up the rest of the computer room is becoming quite daunting.  I just don't know where to put all those things I should give away to other people and NOT just donate to the City Union Mission.  Also the next labor in that room now requires climbing and I'm not looking forward to standing on the high step-stool and sorting blouses, jackets, vests, blazers, etc.

When Hubby first hung the top rod between the bookshelves for my blouses, I could just barely reach it.  But I found out this year I've shrunk a full inch since 2011.  Well, actually in 2011 I think I'd shrunk a 1/2 an inch -- but I wouldn't accept it.  Now, I've got proof I've actually become 5 foot 5 inches -- and I'm supposed to be 5'6" and once was proud of it.  I wasn't too tall or too short, my feet reached the floor in airplane seats and I (once) balanced out girth and height.  No longer. 

But the real truth for our current lack of ambition is probably the heat.  This heat is unrelenting.  We don't get any rain and the earth is dry, cracked and barren brown.  Even the weeds have died.



We just had our foundation repaired because of dry earth during the 1990's -- and now this.  Hubby was out watering the foundation this morning.  We can't afford to have this newly repaired one bow again.  The weather person this morning explained we have seven more days ahead of temperatures over 100 degrees.  Some days we are hotter than Phoenix, AZ.  Usually we are hotter than Houston, TX.  I always knew couldn't live in either place -- I couldn't take the heat.  Now it's worse here than at any point in my lifetime.

My father told stories about the summers of the 1930's when the heat in Kansas City reached over 100 day after day.  I gather this was during the dust bowl days in Kansas and Oklahoma.  Of course, this was before air conditioning.  He told how folks would take a blanket and pillow out to Swope Park and everyone would sleep on the grass, letting what cool air there was waft over them.  If you know about Swope Park today you can't imagine such a thing.  Actually, I can't think of any park in the city where you'd be safe to sleep outside all night long.  But hundreds did it during the 1930's according to Dad.  They also slept on their front porches or in their back yards.  Anything to get away from the sweltering heat. 

We're taken to making our meals in the crockpot so we don't heat up the kitchen.  It's hard to eat anything hot, anyway.  Sandwiches and fruit have become the staples in this household.  The dogs can't go with us anywhere.  The AC runs almost constantly -- and we have it set at 82 degrees.  At night we have to turn it off so it will get some rest.  Thankfully the house is pretty well insulated, so once the AC goes off we remain "relatively" cool -- just never cold.  If you stir around, doing housework, you sweat.  Which is undoubtedly another reason I'm not being very productive. 

No end in sight for our heat and drought woes.  We're making national news with it -- along with wild fires and crazy people shooting up movie theaters (Colorado has had quite a spat of bad luck lately).  I guess I'll just keep downloading those wonderful 99 cent novels from Amazon and studying my travel books on the Mid-Atlantic states and wait for fall. 

1 comment:

Margaret said...

I can't imagine that kind of unrelenting heat. I've been complaining about our humid 70 degrees. :( CO certainly has had its share of mass killings. I remember when those 5 people were killed at a cafe in Seattle and the police chief said, "There are just too many guns. We can't figure out who is going to use them or when." It's only a matter of time before another one happens.