Hot Time in the Old Town

I rarely complain about the heat. My reasoning is that if you move to Florida, you should expect to be hot. By the same rationale, I have no qualms about whining when the temperature drops below sixty in the winter; it's supposed to be warm. However, I am going to break my rule just this once: It's freaking hot! The clock reads 9:07 p.m. I came home a few minutes ago, and the outdoor thermometer in my car read 95 degrees. (Sometimes it's a degree or two high, but even 93 or 94 degrees this late in the evening is pretty high.) I looked at the forecast for the remainder of the week. Tomorrow and Friday the high will be in the upper nineties, with heat indices at 114 both days. That's insane.

Fortunately I haven't had to go out much so far this week. In fact, I couldn't really go anywhere if I wanted to, at least not during the day. I'm scheduled to work every day this week, and during my breaks I'm squeezing in work on my mom's estate. I keep thinking I'm almost finished and once I cross what I think is the last hurdle, another one pops up. But I digress. When I was teaching -- and new to Florida -- I remember a particularly hot day at the beginning of my first semester. I couldn't find my car (I hadn't yet discovered how to navigate the parking lots, or the campus, for that matter) and the actual temperature was 106. I'm guessing that on the asphalt in the sun it was more like 120. I was nicely dressed and had a big stack of papers, and I spent about a half hour wandering the lots trying to find my car. I wanted to sit down and cry from the misery of it all. But eventually I did find my car -- and its blessed air conditioning -- and the next day I paid more attention to how I got from my car to my office.

These days, most of the time I don't have to go out unless I feel like it. I can do enough work from home to hold myself together, at least financially. Usually that seems a bit of a mixed blessing (as I miss having more frequent social interaction), but in these last days of August, it's all good.