In Which I Whine A Little More About The Heat

I have been completely exhausted since summer set in, and I'm starting to think it's not my fault. Every one of our houseguests so far this summer has also been exhausted. Some of them required a nap every single day of their stay with us, even though none of them were toddlers. The lone toddler/preschooler in the house (that would be mine, natch) has fought her naps with a vehemence I find admirable, since I have to drink two glasses of ice water and mentally steel myself just to swim walk into the kitchen and get some grapes.

The cats are pretty miserable. Piper is really sweaty. I am drinking so much water I feel like I could float. I have stopped cooking for the most part, and we are subsisting on cut fruit and cottage cheese and yogurt and chopped vegetables and pita chips with the various dips I concoct from whatever happens to be in the fridge. We're making our own popsicles and smoothies quite a bit.

We have the air on, but most of the day it's just enough to take the edge off, and even that is getting pretty expensive. I also have a sneaking suspicion our A/C unit is about to crap out on us. It's five years old, like the house, and was doing an okay job until a week or so ago. I've noticed it seems to be working less well, not cooling quite as effectively. One more thing to add to the to-do list.

I bought her a little plastic wading pool*, but every time we use it, we are immediately chased inside by huge black wasps**. With the dry summer, they quickly flock to any water source, and although we knocked down a few colonies during the spring, I can't figure out where these huge, aggressive ones are coming from. I am allergic to bees and many other stinging insects, so I was pretty freaked out to see no less than EIGHT enormous wasps hovering over the wading pool as my daughter splashed away. It's been the same thing every time we have any water outside. As soon as I find them, they are toast, but until then we have to find something else to do around the house.

*Let me tell you a story about this: several weeks ago, when presented YET AGAIN during the late afternoon with the tease of oppressive cloudcover that made everything hotter but did not result in any rain, I actually shook my fist and howled at the sky, "RAIN, already, would you?!" The clouds apparently heard me, and paid me back by dumping the only 45 seconds of rain and fierce winds we got all day on me at exactly the moment I exited the store pushing a shopping cart containing a flat plastic wind-catching wading pool and a three-year-old doing her best to climb out. We were all soaked, the pool almost blew away, and I ran the shopping cart into my ankle pretty hard, which caused a bruise that, over a month later, is still fading into ugly browns and yellows.

**I am so OVER the Southern bugs. It's always something down here. Ants, crickets, bees, flies, wasps, various kinds of huge and freaky beetles, earwigs, giant flying cockroaches palmetto bugs, ticks - some kind of many-legged critter is perpetually making its way into my house. They are all huge and aggressive and bold. It goes on pretty much year-round, and I am about ready to pack it up and go back to shoveling snow in the North just so I can be assured of a couple months where I don't have to worry about entomological invasions. This year seems to have been a good one for ants, wasps, and spiders, because I have been battling all three constantly and I am so SICK of it.