What it has come to

We’re wimps. It’s too hot. We’ve been stuck in the city and I’ve got nothing to say for myself.

Since Sunday every day has nearly hit 37º (that’s 99º for you Fahrenheit folks) and we’ve allowed ourselves to be held prisoner by it. We’ve got a top floor apartment on a hill and still we are without a breeze. I can’t imagine how miserable it must be in the afternoon in the depth of the canyon of main street with the sun baking down on all those buses and cars and bodies packed together. So we’ve stayed home. Bunkered down like characters in a Ray Bradbury story.

Except on Tuesday. C was working and what better way to spend a hot evening alone than with a bottle of Chardonnay. So I ventured down the hill and to the Emporio, our snotty little upscale grocery store. They put in a fancy walk-in, temperature controlled wine cellar. But for whatever reason, they had no white wine in it. Just over priced reds. Go figure. It’s apparently as useless as the untouched grand piano that sits in the café up front. But okay, okay, no problem. I picked a Chilean off the shelf, swung by the chocolate aisle, checked out and schlepped home, crawling up the hill like a survivor making his way out of the desert. (It’s a miserably long, steep hill, that grows longer and steeper when it is still 90º at 6pm). I stripped down to my underwear and decided that because I was all alone, I could be tacky and put an ice cube in my wine glass. So I opened the warm bottle poured and …. It was vinegar. It fizzed like cider. Argh.

At least I still had the chocolate.

On a side note, this heat has been made especially unbearable by the smell leeching its way up from the broken sewage containment box in the garage of our building. Apparently the wall was crumbling and infiltrating the fresh water reserve for longer than we had realized. (Oh! So the water filter isn’t supposed to turn brown the same day we change it? oh… ooohh... Ew.) The problem has been fixed by by-passing the lower reserve and running the water straight to the rooftop cisterns. But given how bad the problem was and how long it was apparently going on, there is talk of a lawsuit against the building construction company. That’ll be interesting. Saturday they’re shutting our water off again so they can re-cement the containment boxes. Oppressive heat, no water -- this is starting to feel apocalyptic.

The only good news this week is that on a subsequent journey to have a little tête à tête with the manager of the useless wine cellar, I discovered a new ice cream shop has opened, directly in my line of fire. It’s like manna from heaven, and made even more so by the “self-service” buffet style, pay-by-weight set-up. You scoop (all you want) they weight it. Amazing. Dangerous, but amazing.

Wine, chocolate, ice cream. The weather has turned me into a hedonist.