The College Girl Called Yesterday

Cooling down with a water hose.

"What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance" ~ Jane Austen (British Novelist and Writer, 1775-1817)

The voice on the other end of the phone is cranky. "It's sooooo hot. Heat index is over 105 degrees and we had to walk around everywhere. It takes 30 minutes for that bus to go from campus to the dorm and then the humidity is so bad that it is too hot to sleep. The fan just blows hot air. I can't get dry after a bath. EVERYONE else has an air conditioner. I just can't take the heat." I know it's hot. It is to cool some today and a little more tomorrow. After much Googling and BizRating and such I found a de-humidifier that will work in her room. That should help. An air conditioning unit is out, there has to be a physician statement that the student has asthma or allergic rhinitis and that if so she has to have had skin testing and they must know what medications she is on. Oh! Well. The de-humidifier is on it's way, it shipped out today from Amazon.com so by the end of the week.......

All of this reminded me of how she coped with the heat as a little one. This was taken in Oklahoma City, her birthplace, the summer she was two, a year before we moved to Mississippi. The heat was more intense there than in Williamsburg. The humidity was less. That summer temperatures got as high as 109 degrees without factoring the heat index. One day while we were out for only one hour, the electricity went off. The air conditioner compressor had been running almost non-stop and heat continued to build up after the fan stopped from the power outage. Had I been home, I would have turned the unit off for a few hours. Unfortunately I wasn't there. The power came back on in about 30 minutes and when it did the compressor exploded. New compressor. Three days with no air conditioning, continued heat and a cranky two year old. This is how we tried to keep cool, playing with the water hose, dousing the t-shirt with cool water and staying in the shade.

So, Nyssa, until the de-humidifier gets there. Spend time in air conditioned student unions, libraries and even on the slow bus. Take a book and make several trips around the town on the COOL bus. Think water hoses, get bottled water for the fridge, move slowly, it will get better.

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