Summer Chronicles

It is hot as balls. With air temperatures reaching a moist 50 Celsius (look it up, it's hot), water failing to come out of the faucet at any given time, and people generally refusing to leave the house between noon and 5pm it is safe to say the dog days of summer are in full stride. It's pretty telling that one of the most common comments I've been getting these days is commendation for buying a fridge last January. Around here, the benefits of keeping food fresh are entirely and definitively secondary to cooling down tap water to a drinkable temperature.

While I spent much of the last month and a half working at camps at the beach or up in the mountains, the last weeks of in site living have given me enough heat to last a lifetime. Too bad there's still two months left of this crap.

With the only reasonably cool hours being shrouded in darkness a particular pattern of semi-nocturnal man-chilling has developed. Since women are not really allowed outside after dark, my summer scene is a complete and unadulterated sausagefest (up from the normal, year round semi-sausagefest). Highlights from this all-male, all the time atmosphere include a two-part hour long discussion on why poop floats, being treated to coffee by someone who paid with hash, and (my personal favorite) watching that same someone steal a porcupine while high and bring it back to his house.

Also, as I may have mentioned some months back, a friend of mine has a particular penchant for acquiring random, worthless, electronic gadgets and bringing them to me for a class on their use. So far I've dealt with various alarm clocks, an illegal cable box, two beepers, a heart-rate monitor and, most recently, a portable digital picture printer. Those last two, which might stick out as not only pricey but also potentially useful were gifts from my friend's brother who works in Spain.

Nice gifts, you may think. Now that family can not only monitor its cardiac health but also print out all of their pictures and make sweet ass collages n shit. Well sure, except the former is broken and the latter will only be useful once they get a digital camera, a computer, a USB key, photo paper, ink and an adapter to plug it into to the wall. Awesome.