Muscicide Monday

muscicide ~ substance for killing flies

I did something last night that I haven’t done in…I can’t remember how long. I closed my bedroom window.

You have to understand what a big deal this is. I’m kind of a fresh air junkie. Even in the dead of winter I have the bedroom window cracked open, even if it’s just an inch or so. And of course in the summer time it’s not just about the fresh air, it’s also about the summer melodies – the wind shushing through the trees, crickets chirping, the odd sleepy bird calling… And let’s not forget the smells of summer – fresh cut grass, flowers blooming…

Of course you can’t hear any of the sounds of summer over the noise from the air conditioner, and I’ve developed allergies so the smells of summer have been making me stuff up more often than not. *sigh*

We got a new air conditioner for the upstairs (and spent way more for it than we were counting on). This one, however, does not fit neatly into the window. It sits on the floor, and it’s rather large, which meant the hanging basket chair on its stand had to move out of its corner at the top of the stairs.

So. I was upstairs in the guest room, rearranging chairs to try and fit the basket chair (and I cleaned out the closet and went through some of the stuff on the bookcase while I was at it) and I couldn’t help but notice the hot breeze coming in the window. So I closed it. And almost immediately I could start feeling the cool air from the new air conditioner wafting in. And then I had to take some clothes into the master bedroom and couldn’t help but notice the difference in temperature. So that window got closed too and we slept in relative comfort the rest of the night.

Now, if I could just bring myself to close the windows down the hall on the main floor maybe we could get the rest of the house to cool down a degree or two. :-)

And for those of you who are keeping track, we’re currently under a heat warning. The humidex is pushing the temperature up over 40C (105F). I’ve gone outside in the winter where the cold takes your breath away but I think this is the first time I’ve ever had the heat take it away.

But you know who likes the heat? The tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes the hubby and granddaughter planted are just covered in little green tomatoes that are just starting to turn ripe.

And look at the tomatoes in my neighbor’s garden – I think these are plum tomatoes and the picture just shows the tip of the iceberg where her garden is concerned:

A bumper crop for sure. Salsa anyone?

Molendinar Monday

molendinar ~ of, like or pertaining to a mill or miller

So…hot enough for you? Have you ever noticed that even when the temperature is sort of reasonable outside the house still manages to heat up like a furnace?

Of course you people blessed with central air conditioning have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? While the rest of us struggle to find ways to stay cool, you’re going about your daily business, safe in the knowledge that the temperature in your house will remain constant no matter what it’s doing outside.

But heat is one thing, humidity is something else altogether, something else you people with central air don’t have to worry about. You can look at the temperature and think “Oh, this isn’t so bad” but you’d be wrong. You've forgotten about the humidex.

This is what happens when you live right on a large body of water, like Lake Ontario. Just like the wind chill in the winter makes it colder than it’s supposed to be, the humidex makes it hotter. So on a day that the temperature is only 24 Celsius, which is a reasonable 75 Fahrenheit, the humidity makes it feel like 36 C, which is an unholy 97 F.

And let’s not forget the creeping dampness, caused by the humidity. This is where everything around you feels damp – you, your clothes, your furniture, your pets – there’s no escaping it. Bread goes mouldy in the blink of an eye.

We do not have central air. We have two window air conditioners – one in the dining room and one in the upstairs hallway. There’s an oscillating fan on the dining room table that blows the cold air into both the kitchen and living room, and we have a couple of fans upstairs – but we only use those if it’s really bad.

For a fan to work well enough to cool you down for sleeping, it pretty much has to be blowing directly on you. Even in high humidity this tends to dry you out a little too much and you wake up with a sore throat. And let’s not forget the noise. Fans tend to be just a tad on the noisy side. Not as loud as an air conditioner (which is why it’s not in the bedroom), but enough to bother your ears if you have to listen to it all night.

Last night the air conditioner in the upstairs window died. The hubby managed to resuscitate it for a short time, but around 1:30 a.m. it began making a grinding, clanking noise, which even if it had still been blowing cold air (which it wasn’t) we wouldn’t have been able to sleep through. It was just fortunate that it had cooled down enough outside that what little cold air came out of the unit’s last gasp was enough to keep us going through the night.

I really have to wonder though, how did we ever survive the heat before air conditioners?

Meedless Monday

Oops! My bad. Apparently in my rush to get this posted last night so that it was still Monday, I somehow managed to forget to save the actual post. One of those technical glitches that I usually catch but....Sorry about that!


meedless ~ undeserving; unrewarded

Yowsa! I almost forgot about this post. But I have, what I think, is an excellent excuse. The heat has turned my brain to mush.

You know all you people who were whining about how cold it was in the winter, and how you wished it was summer? Well I hope you’re happy. We’ve got summer all right – in spades. The heat is bad enough, but the humidity is killer!

What’s the point of summer if it’s too hot and sticky to enjoy yourself outside? The weekend we spent in Toronto was insanely hot, but being outside was tolerable because it wasn’t particularly humid. Plus there was a decent wind most of the time.

But the last few days here have been hot, hazy, and humid. How’s that for alliteration? And what little breeze we’ve had has been hot, hot, hot.

I don’t handle heat particularly well, humidity even less so. Sunday night after dinner I went outside to the front garden (which was in full shade by the way) to dead head my petunias and within minutes I was dripping in sweat.

Have I mentioned we don’t have a central air conditioning system? What we have is an a/c unit in the dining room window and one in the upstairs window. There’s a fan on the dining room table to help distribute the cold air into the living room, and there’s a fan in the bedroom upstairs that I try not to use because it gives me a stuffed nose and a dry throat.

There have been threats of thunderstorms, but no rain. The hubby has had to water the plants just about every day. He was a little concerned about his tomato plants because they’re starting to look a little rough, but I reminded him that last year his single tomato plant looked the same way before starting to bear fruit. And sure enough, the plants are covered in little tomatoes. He’s even got one fully ripe one and three that are almost there.

But the lawns, however, have gone from lush and green to dry and crispy. And summer’s really just getting started.

Global warming indeed.

Microphytology Monday

microphytology ~ study of very small plant life

Happy Simcoe Day. Or Civic Holiday. Or, as some of the locals have been lobbying for it to be, Happy James Cockburn Day. It's not a statutory holiday, but people generally have the day off ... unless you're unfortunate enough to work in retail because while the Post Office and other government agencies are closed, stores are open.

To celebrate the long weekend, our town closes off the main street for a huge, three day sidewalk sale. It's pretty much like a two-block, over priced yard sale. The stores put out all the stuff they couldn't sell over the last few years, but don't lower their prices enough to encourage people to buy.

There's also music and a sand sculpture competition down on the beach. The competition is pretty cool and attracts people from all over. I'm sure there's other stuff going on as well, but I wouldn't know. I tend to keep to my cave during these public displays of madness. ;-)

The competition ended on Sunday afternoon, and Sunday night we had some torrential rain storms sweep through, so I don't imagine there's much of the sand sculptures left. If the rain didn't get them, I'm sure the extremely high winds did.

Last week was a bit of a scorcher. Okay, it was a lot of a scorcher. I have to chuckle at the weather network. They can never make up their mind as to whether or not it's going to rain, and they seriously underestimate the temperature. They did declare an excessive heat warning for our area, but their temperatures were in the high 20s C (high 70s, low 80s F). Someone local on Facebook put a thermometer outside in the sun on one of those days, and the temperature registered 45 C (115 F). I think the truth lies somewhere in between.

I don't handle excessive heat any better than I do too much overcast/grey weather, so last week was not particularly productive. Again. But I decided on the weekend that I'm just going to have to suck it up. August is just starting and I'm sure the heat is going to extend into September, and I can't afford to keep wasting time like I've been doing. Life is too short.

The week ahead is going to be ... challenging. After much searching, the daughter finally found a job. That's the good news. The bad news is, her hours and her husband's hours over lap so they need someone to baby sit during the day. Namely, me.

On the one hand, I get to spend time with the granddaughter every day. On the other hand, I've already fallen behind in the transcribing and a three hour chunk out of my day isn't going to help matters. So again, no more wasting time, and I'll have to re-arrange my schedule to fit all the other stuff I do around the baby sitting. Easy peasy.

Bye, bye, mindless games. ;-)