Heat

I've always had a short fuse when it comes to heat. I get blinding headaches when out in the sun too long without sunglasses and I'm generally unable to tolerate human companyfor very long when I'm uncomfortable.

Nothing compared to what you in the Midwest have been experiencing, but we had a mini-heat wave here last week. On Saturday it was 89 degrees most of the day in our house. For three nights we slept in the tent in the back yard because it seems that houses built circa 1910 were not so concerned with good airflow and the coolest we could get our bedroom was 82. Ugh.

I tried to be nice to everyone (especially Mark), but it didn't always go so well. I'm not sure if it's hormones or if I was always like this only I forgot because I lived by myself for multiple years without anyone to notice when I was irrationally cranky. The heat really got to me this time. If I decided I was thirsty, you didn't want to be between me and the sink. On Saturday night, I collapsed into bed. Mark wanted to sleep in the tent, but I didn't want to because the tent is pitched on an incline (the whole yard is an incline) and it wasn't comfortable. On the other hand, I didn't want to stay in the bedroom because it was too freakin' hot. The result? I was as whiny and cranky as you might expect an overtired toddler to be and found myself utterly unable to regain control.

This ugliness reared its head yet again on Sunday. We decided to head to the beach and had to stop for sunscreen on the way at Zellers, the Canadian equivalent of Kmart with just as much organization and customer service. It actually went fairly smoothly even though we had to hunt through the entire store for the sunscreen since it clearly wasn't in the obvious location in the pharmacy. We saw a lady pushing the stroller we want and asked her if we could take a look. She didn't speak English, but we looked anyway. This was the highlight of the trip.

Standing in line were a minimum of sticky, whiny children and we paid for our sunscreen and were on our way. I was still in a foul mood. Mark made the mistake asking what was wrong (never ask an irrational person what's wrong). I told him that it didn't matter because there was no satisfactory way to resolve the situation. I wanted to go swim in a proper lake, not one of the dinky, dirty, redneck-crowded lakes around here. I also didn't want to swim in the ocean because it's way too cold to do anything more than dunk. Plus, growing up in fresh water, I somehow developed a habit of letting the water run down my face and over my lips. I never got too concerned when some of it trickled into my mouth - heck, I never even realized I was doing this until I swam in the ocean for the first time. Ocean swimming meant icky, nasty salt water in my mouth, slimy seaweed swirling around my ankles, and little dead crabs floating on the surface of the water.

I started to dream of Walloon Lake and how nice it was to swim there which led my already cranky self to think about the sale of the Walloon Lake house. It only got worse.

We decided the ocean was the lesser of these two evils and headed to a secluded cove a little way out of town. By the time we got there, I decided to make myself dunk in the cold (like 55 degrees) water and climbed onto a rock to dry out. Being cool really improved my mood and I reflected on how irrational I had been. Later, we received a tip from a family who had climbed to the end of the rock we were seated on and saw a HUGE bright purple starfish. Beach trip salvaged.

The point? I still don't know if I've always been this irrational or if it's merely a by-product of pregnancy. I'm not sure if I want to find out. In the mean time, here are a few pictures of our garden. we apparently have perennial dahlias and gladiolus. The vegetables we actually planted ourselves this spring.