My friends, it is HOT.

The temperature, the last few days here in my little corner of Washington, have been over 85 degrees – someone said today, maybe even over one hundred degrees. Now, for some of you to whom scorching temperatures are a daily event, it may seem like it’s not all that hot. However, keep in mind that I live in the Seattle metropolitan area. The location where, as people love to point out when they know I’m from around here, it rains almost all the time (supposedly). That very excess of rain is what makes hot days so hard to tolerate…we have no time in which to get used to the temperature before it’s gone again.

Usually, our winters are (you guessed it) rainy. Temps are usually between forty and sixty degrees. Usually once or twice a year, we dip to freezing or below, but mostly we’re pretty temperate. Autumn and spring are basically rainy days interspersed by a couple of sunny days, and these sunny days almost ALWAYS happen in the middle of the week. Never on the weekends. In the summers, we get around seventy to eighty degrees, with eighty-five being a “scorcher”. So the recent weather is pretty much outside the norm, and it is seriously causing people problems. Namely, myself.

Yesterday, I went to go pick up my customary 24 pack of water bottles for $5 at Safeway (Aquafina, thanks) and I was confronted by shelf upon shelf of absolute nothingness. The entire stock of Aquafina and even Dasani was sold out. Gone. All they had left was the generic brand and some other brand that for some reason, although I know logically doesn’t taste ANY different from Aquafina, still tastes wierd to me. So I passed on the water.

I found out today that there are no fans (as in, plug them in and they blow air on you) left in the entire Tacoma metropolitan area. Sold out. There are also, in case you are interested, no hot dog buns either. The floor I work on had its air conditioning go out today. My fave drunked-blogging locale is hotter than FUCK, and the wireless network is down. My house is WAY too hot to be in, so we are relegated to blogging from another bar which has air conditioning AND wireless internet, but NOT the happy hour deals that City Lights has. Sigh.

I remember when I was a kid, I used to love days like today. There was a pool across the street from my house, and I’d go there or I’d turn on the sprinklers, or splash myself with a hose. It seemed like I lived for the hot summer days…and the evenings were the best. Where you could be outside at ten at night and it would still be warm and comfortable, and somehow you could smell summer in the air. Like suntan lotion and mown grass, and that one smell that I can’t even describe that just says, Summer! that I think about in the middle of winter when all it’s doing is raining and being miserable.

And now. Summer’s here and all I want to do is bitch and moan about how hot it is, when I know damn well that in the middle of the winter, as I’m walking to my office in the rain and trying to protect my hair from frizzing out, after forty-six straight days of nothing but water pouring down from the heavens, I’ll be WISHING for weather like today.

I think I’ll go take a walk tonight along the waterfront. Right about sunset time, when the breeze off the ocean makes everything tolerable and the light from the setting sun is that really great goldeny-syrupy kind in which everything looks beautiful, and I’ll just try to enjoy the fact that it was hotter than hell today.

Maybe that will make up for the fact that I feel like I’m going to pass out.