“I’ll be back again next week, so adios till then.” I should know better than to end a travel journal entry that way. Given the unpredictability of our lives, a week could well turn into a month, or a month into three months. That’s what happened this summer. A few days turned into a week, a week turned into a month, the months rippled by smoothly. I look at the date on my last journal entry; June became late August, August slid right into late September, and now October is halfway gone.
It’s not been an uneventful time. We’ve had the hottest weather on record for five months; Tyler left for Boston for ten days, returned for four, then left for three weeks (he’s back now); Alex moved out, after nearly twenty-three years of sharing a house with us; we’ve put our house up for sale; we’ve seen Despicable Me (twice) and Shrek IV in theaters.
Paul and Denise celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary the same day Chelsea turned twenty-six; I’ve lost twenty-seven pounds and many inches; Chelsea and I have both lost body fat; and we’ve downsized our earthly goods once again – we’ll have cut down by another seventy percent when Chelsea finishes the last of the FreeCycle and Craigslist listings. We didn’t take a day off in close to a month.
Added to all this was kayaking and snorkeling for my birthday over Labor Day weekend, the recent addition of another roommate, and Chelsea and Alex flying off to California three weeks ago for their dad’s wedding.
No wonder we’re tired.
Weather
Our hot weather underlaid everything from late May till the last two weeks. We had record-breaking heat in May, June, July, August, and September. In fact, South Florida was mentioned in an article on weather.com as being in the top ten or eleven most miserable summer spots for 2010 for our record-breaking stretch of “hot mornings” (it never got below 80 degrees at night for one uninterrupted eleven-day stretch). While we generally didn’t go as high as last year’s peak temps of 115, it’s been this year’s unrelenting stretch of low hundreds (102-107) and hot nights (very rarely below 80) that wore us down.
It was so hot for so long that the cats wouldn’t go outside unless absolutely necessary, both night and day. After several months of seeing Cassie in the same two spots inside, Tyler walked over to her one evening as she lay comfortably stretched out on the couch, saying, “Does she ever move?” We assured him she did, but even we had begun to wonder! It’s only this last week that they are finally staying outside as they usually do.
For several months we couldn’t go grocery shopping without bringing a cooler, even to our local shops less than three miles away – cold items would be hot and frozen items would be melting within two to three minutes. It was so hot that the air conditioning units in the cars couldn’t overcome the stifling heat, so we ended up driving without air conditioning. That created another level of discomfort – sticking uncomfortably to car seats, muddy heat headaches, and sweat-soaked clothing. Yuck!
Our only strategy was to avoid the heat if at all possible. We’d do errands early or late, missing the crowds and the heat; we left on our bike rides a half hour earlier and made sure we didn’t dally returning (it was usually a real feel of 105 by 9:30 a.m. as we returned from our rides); we did all outside work around the house before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m.
Needless to say, the heat put quite a crimp on our lives for the entire summer.