If you can't take the heat

Temperature is a relative thing really. I jest with my friends that summer in Canada is a blustery 40 degrees with rain. Some of them believe me. But when your winter is minus 65, then plus 10 is shorts wearing weather. I remember once, wearing a pair of ninja turtles clam diggers (what is now known as a sensible capri pant) to school in the 8th grade when it was minus 5 or so. Yes, I did just skip over the fact that I owned Ninja Turtle Capri pants and wore them in public! That is another posting, I'm sure. I remember thinking that Canadian summers were extremely hot and unbearable. Again, all relative to the fact that we froze our buns off half the year, with little to no sunshine I might add. (I cannot get a tan to save my life to this very day) Summer would come and we would play outside, go to the lake and swim (in what must have been only barely fridgid waters). We would go to North Battleford to go to the water slides and slather on the sunsceen. I remeber getting a sun burn once and the peeling skin and searing red hot pain that insued. We didn't have air conditioning on the farm so we would open every window in the house and turn on every fan. Most of the rooms have ceiling fans. Just a bit of trivia. When we got our house in North Battleford it had that coveted freon box. AIR CONDITIONING, what a luxury!!! (I might add that it was not central air, and we probably had to run that thing for 6 days straight to cool off the house). We also had a swamp cooler. If you don't know what that is, its kind of like this huge obtrusive fan, that has a compartment for water inside of it, and when you turn on the fan it blows across the water, creating cooler air. More like a source for spreading must and disease, plus a fantastic place for mosquitos to nest should they ever get into the house!! But it was the early 90's and we did a lot of things that weren't the best for our health. Neon prints for example..........I'm just saying!! We'd breakout our thongs (what Canadians call flip flops, not g-string underwear), shorts, tshirts, sunglasses and live like Californians for a couple of months. If you've never experienced a summer on the Canadian praries, you must know that the sun rises at about 5 am and it doesn't really get dark until about 11pm. Plus there are usually a million thunder storms cause its so hot (or our version of hot) and humid (again, all relative). The weather changes almost every 10 minutes on the prairies. I can remember dancing in the rain to cool off. Oh what fun. We had family in Arizona and sometimes would go there in the summers. Phoenix in the summer, now that's hot. Oddly though, we didn't die. Ours was a wet heat and completely different to the scorching of the American desert. We were tough, we were Canadian!!!

Then I moved to New York City. Well, let me say that before I moved here I was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Also extremely hot and humid. New York is the same. It's currently 93 degrees outside, but with the humidex, its more like 100. Yes that's right, they tell us here how much hotter it is because of the humidity. At home you get the temp and wind chill factor. So its only minus 45, but with the wind, feels like minus 60. I live in a 6 story building built in the late 20's. So it would seem that central air wasn't much of a priority during the depression. Can't understand why not??!! I have a small air conditioning unit in my room, one of those kind you put into the window. It runs all night, poor little engine that could. I have a fan that blows constantly. The rest of the apt is a large furnace of terror. I kid you not when I say that I can't walk down the hall without shoes on, simply for the fact that I might burn my feet from the heat rising up from the 5 floors below. This morning I took a shower, cold I might add, and my shampoo was hot! :( Not warm, but hot. Fresh shampoo out of bottle, as if it had been in the microwave for a minute. The toilet seat is hot. You can't sit anywhere without getting a huge case of swamp crack. All I want to eat is Popsicles and ice cream. Maybe a yogurt. I ran some cold water (relative) from the tap into a glass to drink. I added ice cubes, like 5 of them. They had melted completely in about a minute. All 5 of them. Now, why am I typing this??? I just returned home from a week long visit to my parents in Canada. Everyone there was complaining about how hot and humid it was. Didn't get past 80 the entire visit. I was in heaven. I think I even whore jeans and a long sleeved shirt one day, and wasn't melting. I would give my left arm for that kind of weather. Warm, but not hideous. Humid, but not swimmingly so. The wide open spaces and breezes are heaven compared to the concrete furnace that is Manhattan.

Dear Diary, I didn't know you could sweat between your toes?