Remote Post - Heat and Chicks

I'm frying down here in Tucson. Daytime temperatures have not dipped below 104 or so since I got here. Nightime temperatures hover in the high 80's. The water in dad's pool is warmer than blood. I hate it. I told dad he better not ever have any kind of crisis in the summertime; I won't come. It's christmas, thanksgiving, or nothing doing from now on.

I know I've crossed the line between reporting and just plain whining, but I can't help it. The van I'm driving down here has air conditioning, sort of, at least it blows air at the people in the front seat that is marginally less hot than the air outside. But I find that even if I park as close to the doors of the store/restaurant/mall as possible, the walk across the blacktop parking lot makes me feel like fainting. You never see anybody on the sidewalks. People live entirely indoors just as if it were January in Minnesota. I realize I'm rather a wimp when it comes to heat, but personally I can't figure out why anybody ever decided this part of the world was fit for human habitation.

I can't help but wonder if it used to be normal to have two solid months of above hundred degree heat every year without respite. I can't help but wonder what it will be like in ten or twenty years. It's scary to contemplate. We have a friend who lives in Mexicali, Mexico - not so very far from here - who told us that for a few days earlier in the summer, the temperature was in the mid 120's. Don't proteins start to denature at about that temperature? Don't people actually start to literally cook in their own skins?

Okay, okay. I'm done for now. In other news - Homero found more baby chicks. He told me on the phone last night that when he went out to the barn for the evening feeding, he saw three tiny newly hatched chicks on the floor. There was no mother hen in sight. Careful inspection of the hayloft revealed a black hen on a nest with several more eggs in it, one of them in mid-hatch. My silly husband put the baby chicks back up in the hayloft with their mom. No, no, I said, you have to bring the mother hen down, eggs and all, and make her a nest on the ground in the mama barn where they'll be safe. If you put the babies back up, they'll just fall off the edge again and freeze during the night. The mother hen won't leave her nest for a couple of days yet. He said he'd do that.

Homero seems to be taking care of everything just fine, at least according to his telephone reports. He says he's not bothering to separate the baby bucklings anymore because they've learned to nurse through the fence. We'll have to see what we can do about that. He's got far too much milk even so, and says he doesn't know what to do with it all now that I'm not making cheese with it. He's eating cereal with milk for breakfast lunch and dinner, along with fried eggs and frozen pizzas. Ah, freedom.

I'm ready to get home.