Tag Archives: hot

Humidity


humid-pic-300x230Ah, you’ve gotta love the Maritimes when they decide to get hot.

On the one hand, my hair looks fabulous. Curly hair + product + humidity = delectable curls.

On the other, I want to cut it all off and let the air cross my fevered skull. I pin it up maliciously and tear it out when the bobby pins have clung too strongly.

Worst thing is my brain goes into park in heat and humidity. I gaze about myself, mouth-breathing, slack-jawed, not a creative cell in my entire little grey collection.

It’s a good job I only really have one deadline to think about – a writing one that I want to do. And one that I’ve already begun, so the words I have to write can be pulled out of the already connected synapses up in my grey fog.

But I know if this humidity doesn’t break soon, I’m going to snap, like the French do during le vent d’autan…

Although for my part, a good wind would be appreciated. Right now it’s like living in a dirty damp dishrag. My sheets are wet, my carpet is almost squishy, my cat is morbidly depressed. There’s a persistent feeling of mould.

And even though my delectable curls will become a Phyllis-Dillerish mass, I can’t wait for the rain to collect the humidity and bring it to the ground.

Maybe then my brain will wake up and I’ll be able to think…

humidity-blah

excellent drawing by Kate Elizabeth Queram

 

 

Fried connection


It’s hot here. 37 degrees plus humidity. Sun finally beating down and I should be appropriately grateful after months and months of rain, but I’m not.
Because I have MS, and the heat means I turn into a close approximation of a three toed sloth.
I move slowly, deliberately, as if wading through jello or like I’m being created in slow motion.
My brain slows, too. I lose words and thoughts and struggle with spatial situations, get disorganized, sleep a lot.
It’s a bizarre thing to watch happen in myself, as I usually move swiftly and think fast and multitask. But I can feel it all sliding over me, caul-like, filtering the world out.
MS docs explain it in that the heat causes my itching swelling brain to become more inflamed, that as the inflammation occurs, the nerve connections start misfiring and there’s so much neural noise that conduction is slowed or misdirected. So my arm muscles twitch (ha! Effortless exercise!) and my legs kick and yet when I want them to move, there’s nothing but a quiet snickering along the lines.
It’s all good. I’ll be back to normal once it cools down a bit. But for now I exist like a car on a construction laden road – moving slowly forward, subject to frequent stops.

Ahoy, Matey! Care for a drink of water?


images-11Well, it might be hard to get one here. In Djibouti, next on our list of countries that people might conceivably be from in the data base, it’s dry. Really dry.

djibouti-city

And crowded.

It should be the cover photo for Friedman’s “Hot, Flat and Crowded”. Talk about your strategic location, location, location, though. It’s smallish formerly French country on the horn of Africa. With a lovely harbour for shipping and piracy. And the saltiest lake on earth, Lake Assal. Well, except for Don Juan Pond, a tiny spot in Antarctica, named after the helicopter pilots that found it and yet, only one of them is named Don. Neither are named Juan. Hmm. I suspect self-aggrandizement. Those helicopter pilots are all the same.

They struggled to independence despite the French, who vote-rigged to extremes around 1958 and threw out all sorts of Somalis who wanted to join with Somalia. Instead they remained French for a while longer.

Djibouti now seems to be surviving independently despite poverty and totally desertified land, and have prioritized education with a view to the future. Kuwait is helping them out.

The French Foreign Legion has an office there, should you romantically wish to join the Legion. You can probably even wear rags tied across your face to keep out the sand.

Impressively, they had an election in 2005 where there was only one candidate (who won!) and an amazing 78.9% turnout.

Given that we can’t dig up more than 30% in our wonderful democracy here where we have many candidates, I wonder about this. Are they all just really really happy with the current leadership? Or did they learn something from the French? In any case, it looks good on paper.

danger-will-robinson2

Unlike their financial state (bad), unemployment (60%) or their maternal and child mortality, all of which are shouting “Danger, Will Robinson!”

But they pretty well all can read, they speak nine languages throughout the country, and in the interest of equality, they circumcise around 95% of both men and women. Isn’t that nice?