The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I t's been really, really hot lately. Hotter than I can remember it being at any point last summer. And humid, too.

The quarter-mile trek from my house to my grandparents' farm has become nearly unbearable. The freshly widened (read: less shady) West Seventh Street is about as hot as your aver- age kitchen range.

Of course, this isn't the first summer I've struggled with temperatures. Previ- ously though, I've been able to make this commute on my bike, which both mini- mizes my time in the sun and exposes me to a nice cool breeze. Now, with road construction on either side of my house, it's neither safe nor practical.

If it makes you feel any better, us Waitsburgers are not alone in our suffering. Temperatures in Phoenix, for instance, reached 118 degrees last weekend.

To put that into practical terms, have you ever heard of Joe Arpaio? The notori- ously tough Phoenix-area sheriff who re-instituted the use of chain gangs?

He passed out ice cream to inmates in order to help them regulate their body temperatures. This leads to two possible conclusions:

It's so hot in Phoenix that Arpaio's heart actually melted, or

It's just really, really hot in Phoenix.

As I type this, it is 9:40 in the evening. I am sitting in a room that doesn't benefit from air conditioning and sweating so profusely that the keyboard is replete with smudged saltwater finger- prints. Yuck.

It's not any cooler out- side. The air feels as warm and sticky as freshly melted gummy worms. I wish I could type in a nice air- conditioned locale, but there is only one computer in the house and it is here.

The things I do for you guys. Sheesh!

In any instance, at least the tomato plants in my gar- den are happy. The tomato, it turns out, is native to equato- rial South America. Coinci- dence? I think not.

Sometime this week, if the temperatures keep up, I fully intend to head down to the city pool and submerge myself completely. After that, I will dash straight to the nearest purveyor of cold beverages and drop two weeks' allowance on as much liquid as my parched body will hold. Following this, I will spend the rest of the day reading outside on the hammock, surrounded by every last table fan I can get my hands on.

My little brother's birth- day is this week. He has requested an ice cream cake, which is just fine by me, as I bake most of our fam- ily's cakes and there are few worse ways to spend a sum- mer afternoon than stooped over a hot stove. No, an ice cream cake means I have an excuse to stand in front of the freezer. And hey, I'm only human, and humans occasionally forget to shut the freezer lid.

On a related note, the quality of ice cream is embarrassingly low these days. Contamination is rampant, and most samples are just wanly flavored compila- tions of pulverized ice and high fructose corn syrup. So I consider it my duty as a caring older sister to sample any and all ice cream used in that cake. Multiple times, if necessary.

Until next time, readers - stay cool.