why didn't i do this sooner?

here in macondo we are into day 7 of a brutal heat wave – last night it was 41 degrees at 10pm.

first, think about how your mom would deal with that, and then trust me when i say that there is probably no one in the world worse at dealing with the heat than my mom.

for the first time in our lives, we have air conditioning. and yeah, we’ll use it – when the heat is unbearable we’ll try to cool the house down enough to make it bearable. for us, bearable does not mean cool enough to want to sleep under a wool blanket, but, indeed, that’s what it means for my mom.

we wanted her to feel comfortable during her stay here, which started out with snot and fever all over the place and everybody, including her, coughing and hacking and sneezing. add to that some unfortunate swarms of black flies, a flooding river that washed away our beach and had us wondering if we should evacuate as a precaution to make sure she’d make it to the airport for her return flight, and a scorching heat wave, all rolled up to mean that we didn’t really leave the house, and she didn’t really leave her room, which she tried her best to keep at about 15 degrees celsius.

so we love the earth and all, and aren’t so crazy about paying high electricity bills either, but we just told her to blast away if that’s what she needed to do.

and then… the power went out. and the house quickly started to get steamier and steamier. then it came back on. and then it went out again. and again. and again.

because this is the thing here in macondo: your problems are not what they seem. your problem is that you need to pay a bill? no, your problem is that the bank machine ran out of money (a few days ago! still!), you haven't gotten paid yet (since april!), the system is down, they don’t accept payment with that card on tuesdays, or in person after 10:30am, or without first getting a stamp on this minuscule piece of paper from the office that is only open from 7 to 8 am in the next town over.

so the power went out, repeatedly, and it was so hot that not even a single molecule of air wanted to, say, circulate.

and really, i’ve got to hand it to my mom, because she sweated, and suffered, and huffed and puffed, and probably fantasized about checking in to either a 5-star hotel or the hospital, until she realized that they wouldn’t have power either (it never would have even occurred to her that even with power, the hospital isn’t air-conditioned). but she dealt with it, and managed to enjoy the monster and the monkey quite a lot.

so yay for her. she left this morning - bye bye macondo, bye bye bubby. more soon on other aspects of her visit.

back to the title of this post – you know how there are things that you don’t do for whatever reason, and then you finally do them, and you just wonder why on earth you didn’t do them long ago? like we drove around with the back seat of our car permanently reclined in this horribly uncomfortable position for a year, and then just before selling it, we brought it to a welder who fixed it for 50 pesos. why didn’t we do it sooner?

well, yesterday, when the power went out, i had a cold shower.

How. Totally. Heavenly. cold, clean, alone time, all rolled up in one.