Memorial Day weekend was hot this year, just like last year. We haven’t turned on our air conditioning yet because it needs to be serviced, and I’m actually dying. It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable saying this, but: I hate summer!
Sorry! It is my least favorite season. I hate heat and humidity and sweating and how slow and stupid the heat makes me feel. I like patio drinks and being outside generally but I don’t like sweating over a grill in the blazing sun and I also am not a person who cares for street festivals or music festivals or, it must be said, pretty much any kind of festival. I don’t want to yuck your yum so if you like these things please continue to revel in them! It is just not my bag.
It will be interesting trying to work inside later today when the temp in the house climbs to 83, but clock this: BOTH DOGS WENT BACK TO SCHOOL TODAY. The mental party I’ve been hosting for myself since yesterday afternoon has been a true rager.
We made some good cocktails over the weekend: Dark and Stormy, Sidecar, Negroni. My husband made a really good steak on Sunday night, and Monday morning I made orange dark chocolate scones. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my dream of an all-scone bakery called Your One and Scone-ly, but if that ever comes true the orange dark chocolate scones will certainly be a top seller. My one piece of advice to you on that recipe, incidentally, is to use half the orange extract called for. Also, make a glaze with orange juice and not orange extract. We’re not monsters.
We did a lot of walking this weekend. Yesterday it was eerily quiet on the streets and sidewalks and I wondered if it was because people were picnicking at home, or if they were crowding the local parks and beaches. I’m sure you've all seen the pictures of what is essentially COVID soup in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. I get that we are all cracking under the strain and that we want to celebrate summer holidays, but yikes.
So as I mentioned we have not turned on our AC yet. We could give it a try, I suppose, but it’s going to be in the 60s again in a few days and we do have a service appointment scheduled, so we might as well hold off. Also the house didn’t have air conditioning for the first 88 years of its life, so presumably people lived to tell the tale.
Last night I was pretty cranky about the Night Heat, though. And I was considerably more cranky once I realized we had the bedroom ceiling fan going in the winter direction rather than the summer direction (it’s fixed now). Right at this moment, in my darkened dining room with the Vornado blowing directly on me, Diet Coke sweating nearby, it is downright pleasant. When the evening sun pours in the front windows and burns everything to a crisp it will be a different story. This is why I pray for rain, or at least cloud cover, every summer day between 5 and 7 pm.
This morning I did something I have not done since early March: run multiple errands in one day. I dropped off the dogs, went to the post office, picked up a grocery order, went to the pet store, and stopped at a different grocery store for the things I couldn’t get in my pickup order. It felt like Before Times except of course for the mask and the distancing and the one-way aisles (motion to keep one-way aisles once this is over!).
Speaking of aisles, my mother texted me a while ago to tell me she’d been scolded at the grocery store by a man in a kilt for flouting the one-way aisles. “Excuse me,” he said to her. “Are you aware you’re going the wrong way?” She told him she wasn’t aware and kept shopping. A jackass in a kilt! Talking to my 79-year-old mom that way! Society is crumbling!
At the pet store this morning I purchased my dogs a plastic baby pool. They have one of these at school and I know our older dog is very “no thank you” about it. The puppy…who knows, although she is very scared of the bathtub. (This may be a trauma response from all the times we had to hose her own poo off of her as a tiny baby.) If they refuse to have anything to do with it, I’ll just put my feet in it and drink cocktails all summer. Yesterday I perused “family” inflatable pools on Amazon and very nearly pulled the trigger, but I put it on my wish list instead. We’ll see how severe a case of heat insanity I end up getting. (Most years my heat insanity is very severe.)