Beat the Heat
It's so hot in the house that the laptop won't stay on longer than ten minutes despite being two feet from the window unit a/c and raised up off the desk by an inch so the air can circulate underneath it. Rob was speculating that he'd be asleep by 4 pm today, but he beat it by 2 hours and has been napping on the couch since 2 pm. It's the only logical thing to do right now in these temperatures and I'd love to join him, but I was still drinking coffee at noon so there's no way I'm gonna doze off. I suppose I could leave and go some place with good air conditioning, but can't come up with any place I'd like to go that doesn't cost money to get in. Yeah, the stores are free, but I'd rather sweat than go shopping. The only free museums I can think of don't have parking and it's way too hot to wait for the bus. I could throw in a movie, but I'm not much of a movie watcher and there's nothing here I want to see for the umpteenth time. And the house is just going to get hotter over the next few hours so maybe I'll take a cold shower and head off to Home Depot. If I'm going to go shopping to cool off, I might as well go somewhere that has stuff I'd enjoy buying if I had any money to spend (which I don't.) And I'd take shopping at Home Depot over shopping at Target any day of the week.

Later: The Home Depot was not the coolest spot in the world, but it was still an improvement over our house. I looked at some very cool, but incredibly expensive doors. I'd have to be pretty damn rich before I paid $1400 for a front door. I drooled over the powertools and dreamed of someday owning a bunch of those nifty solar powered landscaping lights. I looked longingly at the watering wands which would save me the backache I get every time I water the veggies and I searched in vain for mosquito dunks for the ponds which is something I would have bought if they had them. I did get some seeds; Kandy Korn which is supposed to be a good corn variety for this area, some more standard straight-necked yellow squash to plant amongst the corn, along with some Patty Pan squash and some kind of bush zuchinni to plant in pots. I have neither pots nor dirt so I'll have to get creative. Maybe Rob will let me steal some dirt from the turtle pen that's in need of repair and not housing turtles right now. There's a lot of good rich dirt in that pen and I hadn't thought about it before, but turtle pens are a sort of compost pile. They are kept shady and moist with regular applications of mulch and plenty of veggies and fruit thrown in (turtles are messy eaters and some it ends up in the dirt rather in than turtle tummies), plus the turtles dig and keep the dirt turned over on a regular basis. The pens are always full of earthworms too. The turtles snack on the worms, but there never seems to be a shortage of worms. Sounds like good garden soil to me.

PS - Never mind on the idea of using soil from the turtle pens. Turtles carry samonella and it turns out that it can remain viable for at least 280 days in the soil. The pen hasn't been retired quite that long so I'm glad I researched it first.