So Hot

It has been brutal in Texas the past couple of weeks.  The wife & I usually wake up early - six o'clock - to walk the dogs, since it would be cruel & stupid to do it at noon when the Fahrenheit says 110 & the heat index says "the inside of your average functioning microwave."  This morning it was 85 degrees.  If you are mostly familiar with Celsius, that translates to "way too fucking hot for six o'clock in the fucking morning."

Over on Facebook I see some old timers are talking about the heat wave of 1980.  There's a tee shirt at that link that I used to see: "I survived the Texas heat wave of 1980," it read.  But it wasn't easy to survive.

We live in apartments then, my family, called Villa Cordoba.  At some point, I remember, in the middle of the summer, the air conditioning went out.  It's funny I remember the a/c was out but not the power.  Anyway.  Almost everyone in the complex would go to the pool at night to cool off.  (I wasn't allowed, though I was 12 at the time, & could technically swim without adults around.  It was just too late at night, way past my bedtime.)

My mother opened all the windows, hoping to admit a stifling breeze or two, but that just invited the giant cockroaches that crawled the apartment walls into our rooms.  I have a vivid memory of seeing them on the walls across the way - our apartment backed into the manager's office.  I always felt those so-called tree roaches were hateful fucks.  They had it in for me.

We would also put fans in the window, plus, & this is the least effective cooling system ever, we would put bowls of ice under the fans to I guess cool the air coming out of them.  We would have had better results putting the ice down our pants.

Thinking back, it's strange that we had power but not a/c.  We woke this past Sunday morning (in 2018) to no power, but it appears that it was just the power company taking advantage of the relatively cooler morning to maintain the grid.

But back to 1980 for a second: I must've snuck out of the apartment to grab a glance at the pool one night, because I have a memory of so many people crammed into a mid-sized apartment pool that it couldn't possibly have cooled anyone off.  & despite the signs, there was drinking - lots of drinking - lots of noise, too.  It seemed like so much fun.  But I know I didn't get in.  I probably slinked back home ruefully.

& yeah, I survived the 1980 heat wave.  Gimme a tee shirt.