On this heat

WHAT TO DO WHEN IT IS 90° AND HUMIDITY IS SOMEWHERE NEAR A MILLION:

• Nothing.
• Alternate plans that are acceptable:
• Eat ice cream. Maybe some potato salad. Drink an iced chai.
• Give your dogs ice cubes.
• Sit in the basement in your underwear. (True story: our basement is so much cooler than the rest of the house that we slept down there the first few nights we owned the house, because it was August and the air conditioner wasn't installed yet.)

WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN IT IS THIS HOT:

• Cook. Anything.
• Do anything strenuous, like biking or jogging or sexing or watching shows with complicated plotlines.
• Be outside for more than three minutes in a row.
• Drink warm beverages.
• Yardwork.
• Let any patch of skin remain in contact with any other patch of skin for more than a few seconds (this is best managed by laying like a starfish on a blanket on the basement floor. Bonus points if you moan dramatically while doing it. Double-bonus points if you didn't bother to bring down any of the four loads of laundry you should be doing.)

EFF THIS HEAT. What would you add to either list?

On the outdoors

I am, and always have been, an indoor kid. There is a picture of me at just over a year old, sitting at my grandparents' dining room table, that illustrates pretty clearly my feelings on heat. It's Thanksgiving in the picture, and we had just traveled from already-freezing upstate New York to seventy-degree Virginia for the holiday. I didn't react well to the change, and in the picture everyone around me is clearly having a great time, chatting and laughing, and I'm sitting there, mouth open, looking startled, staring at my mom. Apparently that look stayed on my face most of the trip.

I don't deal well with heat. I get heat exhaustion easier than most, and one of the symptoms is that I don't actually feel all that hot, per se: I just feel really shitty. I feel grumpy, and sticky, and miserable, and my head and stomach probably aren't thrilled with me, but I don't usually feel like it's necessary to take a cold shower or swim or pack myself in ice, when really that's the thing my body needs most.

I've gotten much better about being self-aware with this in recent years. That means that on a day like today, when it was 85°, I did my best to take care of myself even while working on a big project out in the sun.

Here's some shit that helps me keep a handle on heat exhaustion and not confine myself to the indoors.

• Take breaks when I need to. Andy doesn't seem to notice the heat at all, so this means taking more frequent breaks than he takes. I'm okay with that.
•  Drink a lot of water. I drank a ton of water but didn't have to pee much - which means I should have been drinking even more.
• Own the fact that I can be outdoors, and I can be helpful, but I probably can't be cheerful about it. The work needs to get done, and I'll help get it done, but I don't have any energy to spare to pretend that I don't hate every fucking second of it.
• Keep good supplies on hand. Today, that meant yellow jacket spray. Fuck those guys. Any time one came near me, it got shot in the face with a steady stream of Raid.
• Make sure I have proper sun protection. The garden I spent most of the day working on gets full sun, and I foolishly left my giant ridiculous sun hat at work. Andy noted that I was looking extra hot and miserable, disappeared for a minute, and came back out with a ladder, umbrella, and bungee cord, which he rigged together to provide me some shade to work in. It was so incredibly sweet of him.
• Take a shower after sun exposure. I start out at lukewarm,  because diving right into cold is too much of a shock and makes me feel shitty. I usually end up turning the water pretty chilly by the end of it, as my body acclimates.
• Sometimes I shower again right before bed, if there's still a lot of residual heat happening. It cools me down more and makes it possible for me to fall asleep. Bonus if there are nice clean sheets!

How do you handle the heat? Do you love autumn and winter, or are you one of those "the hotter the better!" kind of crazies? Any tips for those of us who are total heat-sissies?

Holiday weekend yeah yeah

Gardening is the worst, isn't it? I really like flowers and plants, but I really hate having to mess with them. My end goal is that my gardens will be sort of self-sustaining. I don't want to have to water them, much, or weed them, or do extensive pruning sorts of things all the time. So to make that work, we're re-doing our front garden.

When we bought the house, we put in a lilac shoot from the house I grew up in, two small rose of sharon bushes, a bunch of tulip bulbs, and some hens and chicks. We covered all of the bare dirt with a layer of red rubber mulch, so we wouldn't have to re-mulch every year. Since then, the rose of sharon bushes have quadrupled in size, the lilac is much bigger but still looks a little like we stuck a stick in the dirt, and the rubber mulch has mostly sunk into the sandy soil and has done precisely nothing to keep the grass and weeds from taking over.

Today we pulled out the two rose of sharon bushes and sent them over to live in my parents' yard, where they will thrive. I spent several hours (and several fingernails) pulling up as much of the rubber mulch as I could, so we can put it on Craigslist and try to get rid of it. Over the next days and weeks, we are planning to relocate the lilac, lay down landscaping fabric, and add several varieties of native-type flowering perennials that won't require too much maintenance. We're going to get some landscaping stone to border the whole garden thing, so we won't have to spend so much time cutting the grass that always creeps up around the edge (which right now just lines up near the front walk.

I'm going to go relocate the hens and chicks to the backyard (we have this weird gap between the house and the patio that we filled in with flagstone, and the hens and chicks are going to fill in the cracks), then I'm going to take a shower, then probably a nap. Because it's a holiday weekend, damn it.

Are you with me that gardening is the stupidest of chores??

Two good things and two irritating things.

Today has been an interesting balance. My allergies are acting up hard, helped along by the shifts in weather, leading to a pounding headache and a general sense of stupidity all day. This made it very hard to do more than sit at my desk and stare blankly at the stack of work waiting for me. I also couldn't help checking the clock over and over, and I'm confident that it was 3:19 p.m. for at least fifteen minutes.

Work finally ended, obviously, and on my way home I was tailgated for several minutes by a total douchebag. I watched him in my rearview mirror from the time he swooped in behind me, cutting off the person who had foolishly left more than a car length's distance between us. This douchebag was a king among douchebags, and honked at me twice in the space of a mile. First, I had the audacity to stop at a red light. Even if I had chosen to run the light, traffic was backed up enough that I only would have made it to the opposite side of the intersection. Then, since traffic was so slow anyway, as I crept past a daycare I slowed down a little extra to let a lady out in front of me. King Douche laid on his horn, so I flicked him off in a pretty obvious manner (not my proudest moment, but this headache!). He rolled his eyes, then made a snap decision and pulled into the shoulder and sped past a lane of traffic. I am not proud of thinking that I hoped he crashed and was fine but effectively subdued.

I decided that a little caffeine might help the headache and the cranky, so that brings us to good thing number one: the mocha-coconut frappucino from Starbucks. Have you tried this yet? It was so good! I usually think that mocha frapuccinos are kind of wimpy, not enough coffee or chocolate, but the coconut was lovely. I am one of those people who firmly believes in the glory of chocolate plus coconut. My head feels a teeny bit better, too.

And finally, good thing number two: Tonight Andy and I are going to our first information session on becoming foster parents. I promise I am not going to turn this into a bizarre family-friendly lovefest or anything, but this is something I've wanted to do for a long time, and Andy is finally there with me. Mostly my reason is this: I worked at that shelter for eight years, and a whole lot of the kids I worked with had been in and out of foster care. If I can provide a safe place for one of those kids - who I know to be sweet, loving, funny things - instead of them being sent to some shithole with junkies who pocket the checks, then I feel obligated to do that.

We haven't really told anyone about this whole "maybe being a foster parent" thing yet, because we're so early in the whole thing, but if I can't be excited about shit like this on my own personal blog, where I am mostly anonymous, where can I? If you feel like I'm not cussing enough and talking enough about being hungover or whatever, feel free to let me know.

How is your day? Have you tried that coconut thing? (You should.) Any foster parents or kids out there?

Let's make this an official trend.

Here are several more unrelated things, so we can call this "the week where Rachael wrote all disjointed nonsense entries, as opposed to her carefully planned, powerful writing the rest of the time."

Today's post, in a special tribute to "cleaning out my email inbox, which is where I send stuff to myself so I don't forget about it," will be a series of snippets of stuff I have emailed to myself or others.

First: a single-line email to my work best friend, regarding a coworker who is very smug about the way she lives her life. Said coworker does not seem to realize that several of the main tenets in her life scheme outright contradict each other. She also is the kind of human who would get very, very unpleasant if anyone were to suggest this to her. The single line was quite poetic, though: "MY CHOICES DEFINE WHAT I AM AND BY EXCLUSION WHAT YOU ARE NOT. LET ME SHARE THEM WITH YOU AT LENGTH."

Second: a seriously old entry by Mimi Smartypants, whose archives I have been slowly perusing for weeks because I am a creep (I am back in 2004 right now, no joke), in which she describes her aversion to showering. Reproduced here because it captures pretty neatly the inconvenient mess that is actually taking a shower: "I bathe every day, barring an episode of suicidal despair or the occasional housebound Sunday (provided my head does not stink like an ashtray from the night before). But I do not enjoy bathing. Or showering. Many times I have expressed the wish that there was a magical way to be shiny soap-smelling clean without all the nudity, water, and washing. I find it tedious and I would rather not. But I don't like being dirty or smelling bad, so until that magical non-shower is invented it looks like I am screwed. I guess I could develop a heroin problem, since heroin addicts also find showering unpleasant but they are too messed up (on the heroin!) to care what they smell like. I am an expert at finding big, messy, dangerous solutions to tiny problems, as anyone who has ever watched me try to kill a spider or unclog a drain can attest. Maybe I should get a government job."

I agree fully, except the suggestion that nudity is a pain. I would so much rather hang out in my undies - as in, just briefs - than be fully clothed, any day. And the whole not-fully-naked is mostly due to a combination of hygiene (who'd want to sit on the couch after a naked person?) and stubble-itching.

Third, two recipes via V-Neck and a Cardigan, both of which look amazing, and which I emailed myself so I wouldn't forget about them:
Cocoa brownies with browned butter
Funfetti sandwich cookies

Fourth, I am running the new version of Firefox at home and the old one at work, and what the fuck, Firefox? Why did you move the home button way the fuck over there, away from the back-and-forth buttons? And because the little right-click menu is slightly different, I keep opening neat stuff in new windows instead of new tabs, the way God intended. It is mildly irritating! By golly, I intend to do absolutely nothing about it!

So there, internet! I'll be better next week, or something.

Titles are hard when nothing's connected.

1. I went running again. I realize that there are people who do this, every day, on purpose, without making a big deal out of it. I am not yet one of those people. I seriously was such a wimp about it, too. I was out for about twenty minutes, and I'm sure more than half was walking. But! You have to start somewhere, and other positive things!
1a. I am pretty sure the whole "runner's high" thing happens because if it didn't you would straight-up either murder someone or collapse in a sobbing heap. Running is the fucking worst, and it really really sucks right up until that split second where you go, "Oh wait. I could keep going, I guess. Maybe I won't firebomb this whole block after all."

2. Whenever anyone, including me, says "[such-and-such] is the worst," I immediately think, "Worse than genocide?" The answer is always "No, not worse than genocide" Really puts things in perspective: Running is awful, but I don't fear for my life because of the condition of my birth. Sweet potatoes suck, but having to eat them is better than watching all of my loved ones be ethnically cleansed! Coworkers with compromised digestive systems are still preferable to the systematic murder of a people! Be warned, though: If you point this out to someone who is complaining, it will pretty much kill a conversation dead.

3. Something new for me to feel self-conscious about: I cannot draw a reasonable arrow. I always end up blocking them out to make them look more even so you can tell it's actually an arrow and not just a stray mark or evidence of the palsy or something. Isn't this a bizarre thing for me to worry about?

4. My sister-in-law (Andy's younger sister) is recovering from some crappy health issues, so today I mailed her a sudoku book, a crossword book, and the trashiest, most ridiculous (and cheapest) housewife porn I could find at Wal-Mart. I just google-searched to find out if "housewife porn" is the phrase everyone uses to describe romance novels of a certain caliber, and it turns out that no, people in general do not. Turns out also that you maybe shouldn't google that phrase from work. Anyway, I'm hoping the stuff I sent helps her recovery process which is mostly just boring at this point. Also, the novel I got involved a police chief of some sort, but if I had had my wits about me, I would have tried to find one with a male nurse, so as to relate more to her situation.


5. This book looks really awesome. Via A Cup of Jo.

That's all I got! Whatchu got today?

Hooray for festival season!

I went to the first of the season's many warm-weather-type festivals on Saturday. I love crowds - I even like Christmas shopping in December - so obviously festivals are a great thing to me. The best part is, I get to feel incredibly smug about the choices I've made in my life while simultaneously judging hundreds of strangers!

We had to park about half a mile away and walk to the festival, which gave us plenty of time to discuss how we're apparently not going to come in first in this years Most Dandelions in Your Front Lawn Contest, and how just because it was finally warm out it doesn't mean you should walk around barefoot in the city, and we played several rounds of What Exactly Is That Smell?

The location of this particular festival is smack-dab in the middle of some seriously-not-good neighborhoods, some gentrified areas, and a whole den of hippie weirdos, so I got to judge strangers to my heart's content. There was the hugely fat white-trash guy in the three-toned pickup truck, wearing what might originally have been a white t-shirt but was now the same shade of beige as his flabby self and also missing its sleeves; more than one girl wearing a halter or strapless dress with a regular bra; a fierce-looking ghetto princess wearing leggings and a midriff-baring shirt (so much skin!); and bunches of granola-loving hippies wearing those ridiculous dip-dyed dresses you can only get at festivals like this one (or apparently on Etsy, of course).

Really, one of my main goals was to get frozen yogurt for the first time this year, but the crowds were insane. The festival lasts ten days, and Saturday was the ninth day and the only day of the nine that it didn't rain, so everyone in the entire city had the same idea I did. This festival takes place in a giant park, so the foot-traffic of hundreds on rain-soaked turf meant there was sticky, stinky, disgusting-lose-your-shoe-in-it mud everywhere. So we bailed on the frozen yogurt and walked half a mile back to the car, then drove to Lugia's ice cream for some of the best ice cream around. These people do not mess around: I got a kiddie cone (two scoops) and couldn't finish it. A small there is three full-size, not-skimpy scoops. I love it.

I think my favorite part of festivals is that glorious conflict between appreciating being a part of a huge joyful mess of people, and being a total misanthrope at the same time.

What's your take on festivals? Do you love them? Hate them? Avoid them at all costs?