HEAT WAVE!
HEAT WAVE! We hit a record here on Friday…. 109 degrees. 109. How insane is that? It is the hottest day on record in our Southern town since they started taking records in the 1800s. ONE HUNDRED AND NINE DEGREES. And that is without the heat index!
“We’re having a heat wave,” you can sing that again Rosemary Clooney. We are having one heck of a heat wave (and yes, I have been singing that song in my head for the last few days). So what does one do when it hits 109 degrees in the South? Well, if you are me… you abandon your apartment. Yep. I packed up a bunch of bags, plenty of reading material and headed over to my Dad’s house. I love my apartment, it is a beautiful two bedroom that is the entire second level of an old house. It has character, is plenty of room for me and is cheap in the grand scheme of apartment costs. But it has a lot of factors working against it in this heat: it is solid brick… great material most of the time, but in this heat it is like an oven. Also, it was built in 1945, so it is a bit old. Plus I am upstairs, so while I do have central air, the unit is downstairs it takes some work to keep it cool. And bottom line… it just doesn’t cool worth a damn once the temps hit anything over 100 degrees… who can blame it? So, when I had it set on 73 degrees and it was reading 80, I said enough and started packing. I’d rather be comfortable and hanging out with my family that horribly hot in my apartment. Besides, I just turned the AC off when I left, so that is several expensive days of electric I won’t have to pay for now. J
What else do you do when it is over 100 degrees outside? You go to the movies. My Aunt and I went to see Magic Mike on Friday because it was soooooo hot out we just wanted to be inside. Plus, who doesn’t want to see Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum show off their abs over and over again? Seriously…. Who has abs like that? It was nice and cool in the theater. The movie was okay, it definitely didn’t romanticize stripping, but it was just lacking something in the end when it comes to the plot that I can’t exactly put my finger on… it was just different. But once again, super air conditioned theater and drool-worthy abs, who cares about the plot?!
Also, when it is this hot out, you do not do anything that involves turning on the oven for cooking and you don’t feel bad about having as much ice cream as you would like. Several family members ended up coming over to my Dad’s tonight and we all ordered Chinese take-out and watched a movie, thank you Spike TV for showing The Day After Tomorrow. Blizzards was exactly what we needed to see on this hot day, and somehow I had managed to never see the movie before! Around 10pm we made a run to Kroger to pick up ice cream. It was 92 degrees at 10pm. NINTEY TWO DEGREES AT TEN AT NIGHT! You could tell that plenty of other people were eating ice cream to, because there were a lot of holes in the freezer cases. We were able to pick up several pints of Graeters (the best ice cream ever) and chill out in front of the TV.
So, what other ways are people cooling off in this insane heat? So while the temps over 100 are odd, we are use to temps in the 90s a lot… I keep telling myself that two months (July and August) of hot weather every year is worth the ten months of great weather the rest of the time. Remind me of that when it is 105 tomorrow afternoon!
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