Heat Wave

It was 103 degrees here over the weekend. I know because people kept asking…"do you know how hot it is!?!??” Given how few houses have air conditioning (including this one), the heat tends to make San Diegans a bit inelegant. [Molly has been walking around with an ice pack on her back for 3 days.] Rita and I spent half the weekend trying to steal air conditioning from other places. I’ve never been so happy to go to Williams Sonoma in all my life. But after driving around in the car’s air conditioning for 3 hours, my roommate Al Gore was starting to feel a little guilty.

Needless to say, Rita was a convert on using the recently installed portable air conditioning in the house. We sealed up one room and turned that portable jobbie up as high as it would go. And I mean sealed up. Every window was closed, the French doors locked tight, even a towel stuffed under crack of the door to the hallway to keep one iota of Freon from escaping. One of my friends called it the panic room…and he was right. If you open that door and let out 30 minutes of coolness…I. Am. Going. To. Panic. By the middle of the afternoon, Molly had her legs crossed, Rita was battling frostbite and the French doors were covered in condensation. [I thought about tagging the window with a “Wash Me” scrawl…but decided the hottest day of the year probably wasn’t the best time to test how funny I am.]

When I finally did leave our walk-in cooler for provisions [trips to the wine room being replaced by trips to the popsicle drawer], I opened the hallway door to a complete wall of heat. It was like a scene from Backdraft. [And just for the record – popsicles last about 13 seconds in that heat, so enjoy your soon-to-be kool-aid.]

Well, gotta run…Rita's out of town, so Molly and I invited ourselves over to the air-conditioned neighbors for breakfast.