Two days at once

[hawkwing_lb]

06-06-06

More sun today. I'm going brown in patches, but if this keeps up I'll be getting sick. The rockpools down on the shore are teeming with life: crabs and tiny flat fish and strange long-bodied antenaed things less than the length of my finger joint. Death and life and life and death, all within millimetres of each other.

Got the first line of a short story, too. On the Ile de Rien, in the Oceans of Night, the powers that were upheld the status quo with fire and steel and casual disregard for anyone who happened to be in their way.

I have chunks of ice melting in a bowl on my desk, in the hopes that that'll help keep the room a bit cooler than it was yesterday evening. Country like Ireland, you don't get a/c in private houses, and we don't have so much as a fan.

Weather like we have this week, feels like that might have been a bit of an oversight.

07/06/06

It's clouded over today, but it looks more like heavy heat mist than cloud from here. I'm off to town. The Lies of Locke Lamora is in at Waterstone's. Hopefully it won't heat up too insanely before I get back.

If the sun comes out again, I can sip cool drinks and sit in the shade reading my new book. Whee!

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

So, what's the temperature then? 22 degrees? ;-)

The bowl of ice is helpful, but if you really want to cool off, you really need at least a fan -- even a small one that stands on a table or desk. I lived in the Caribbean without a/c, at temperatures that rarely dipped down to 27 degrees C (and that was on a cold winter night). A fan blowing towards me, and a wet washcloth -- ah, that was heavenly. I could actually get chills.

Those were the days, so they were. I hated them. Me, living in the summer for an endless two years? Never any winter? Now you know why I have a soft spot for Jadis. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Probably around 25, yesterday. Cooler today, but still in the twenties.

I was in the Caribbean once, in November. Ten years ago, and I still remember that it was impossible to move in the three hours around midday.

You like endless winter, then? :-) Still, evil is lots more interesting than goody-two-shoes intent on reinforcing the status quo. Fictional evil is subversive. And cool. :-)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Ah, 25 is what we got up to today, a nice mild day -- a little warmish for me, I must admit, but far better than the hellish transition from 10, 14 degrees all the way up to 35. Yes, 35 degrees. It then stayed around 30+ before finally dropping back to a lovely 25-ish. Now, if I were just returned from the Caribbean, this would be freezingly cold. Why, when it got down to 27 I needed two sheets on the bed, to keep me warm at night. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. :-) It's all in the mind, as it were.

No, I suppose I do like the season's change after all; I just prefer fall and winter -- and early spring -- to summer's heat. I'd be more bothered by endless summer than by endless winter, I admit. As I've always pointed out to my family, it's much easier to get warm (by dressing warmly and by cuddling together) than it is to get cool.

Oh, that reminds me: if you're suffering from the heat (and you probably are), take a clean washcloth and soak it in cold water, wring it out, and keep it with you. Put it on your neck, wipe your face, hold it on a knee -- use the power of evaporation to cool you. I used to do this every summer when I was a kid and we didn't have a/c or fans.

Yes, the old days...

Evil is fun to watch and fun to defeat. Goody-two-shoes are scarier in real life, as they suck all the fun out of everything. Do you realize that in this country, this school district won't allow children to roll down the hill? Because "someone might get hurt".

Sheesh. Give me a Jadis any day.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I'm a cold-weather person, me. Brain works best in 4-8C, but the fingers complain. :-)

I know a couple of tricks to keep cool. Cold water/cloths on the pulse points works. As does going down to the shore and wading in to mid-thigh. :-)

That school district sounds very much afraid of litigatious parents :-). If one was afraid of getting hurt (or getting the poor ickle darlings hurt), one would have to stay cowering in a locked interior room and never do anything at all.

Though certain precautions are necessary. I knew a girl once got her front teeth knocked out walking down to a hockey pitch, because someone wasn't looking where she swung her stick, and the gumshields weren't in yet. Certain sensible precautions were taken after that. :-)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I'm a cold-weather person too..all my ancestors came to the US from cold countries -- Ireland, Poland, and what I'll call "Czechoslovakia", even though it started out as Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Ukraine. ;-)

Schools here are very afraid of everything, it seems. Yet they cannot use any common sense at all. Sensible precautions are one thing, but around here, they'd be more likely to ban hockey. x-p I just learned that the cafeteria has no knives whatsoever. Not even dinky little plastic ones. How on earth are these children going to learn anything? Sheesh.

I'd better stop before I remember more idiocy from the school. I can hardly wait until he gets out of there.