The Honest Courtesan

For the second year in a row, we suffered from a heat wave barely a week into summer.  Of course, this one was both much shorter (3 days) and much less intense than last year’s.  The temperature stayed at about 35^o all day Sunday (that’s 95^o for you Fahrenheit fans) and only started dropping about an hour before sunset; this is a picture of my desk lamp readout about 6 minutes after sunset, and you can see it’s still plenty hot indoors (though it isn’t nearly as bad downstairs, because heat rises).  And that’s why those of y’all who live in truly hot parts of the country shouldn’t laugh too much; though such summer heat is not abnormal through most of the US South and West (and even low by the standards of, say, Phoenix), very few houses up here are air conditioned.  I’ve lived in both Louisiana and Oklahoma, and while it’s easier to be outside in this heat here, it can get rather unpleasant indoors until it finally cools off, which can take until well after bedtime upstairs (where my bedroom is).  Yesterday it was warm but not really hot, and starting today we’re supposed to be back to our cusp-of-July norm of high teens-low twenties Celsius (60s-70s Fahrenheit).  The mild weather is one of the reasons I chose to move here; I’m more comfortable and Grace’s health problems make her unable to take the heat as she could when she was young.  And even though I’m still going to complain about the occasional heat wave, it’s still worth enduring 16 hours of daylight at this time of year for a climate in which these temperatures are an abnormality.