The heat is on
These are not funny novelty candles. They’re just plain white wax cylinders I keep on hand for power outages. I haven’t run them through an oven, or purposely subjected them to science or art projects. They just sit in a quiet corner of my kitchen, waiting for the next tree to fall on the power lines.
The reason they’re slumping so dejectedly is that the heat is back. A few days back, I got a reading of 38 degrees Celsius in the coolest, shadiest part of my house. In northern hemisphere terms, this is like recording 99 degree heat in the first days of March.
If past experience is any guide, there is both good news and bad news to this situation. The good news is that it will not get too much worse than this for the rest of the summer. The bad news is that summer is eight months long.
The Guaraní word of the day is mínga, meaning mutual aid or cooperative work. Work at my actual coop has been just straight-forward number crunching lately, largely a one-person effort. But I’ve recently been involved with a secondary domestic violence project. That one has involved the cooperation of the town judge (the initiator and facilitator), the radio station (free advertisement), the Catholic parish (use of their meeting facility), the judge’s assistant (general secretarial help and test audience), Peace Corps Paraguay and other NGOs (stacks of materials and tapes), fellow volunteer Liam (use of speakers and chair wrangling), and myself (as-needed fetching and pestering). Good times!
September 5th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Ooooo its gonna be long and hot. Best of luck getting through the heat. CO in December is going to feel like the arctic to you after all of that. I am going to go to the thrift store and swap sales to try to pick up some gear for you, so you don’t have to worry about all of that. Let me know some sizes and I will see what I can get on the cheap cheap.