2 Dam Hot: How are you coping?

How are you coping?

So are you actually talking hot hot or hot for non-Southern Californians hot?

Just has a Solero. And driunk a pint of water in 3 seconds. My poor oirish genes.

Our (portakabin) office has all 3 windows & the door open, 2 fans pushing the air around & the thermometer says 36 degrees. Will have to knock off soon.

(our head of HR says we shd keep the windows shut as the warm air is coming IN but this is way too counter-intuitive)

The aircon is not coping but I keep nipping iinto customer services to stand in front of their big fan.

No wet patches to speak of yet, but my head is a little damp.

also a pint at lunchtime was a terribly bad idea.

Number of people passing out and getting treated by ambulance in Uxbridge town centre spotted so far by members of staff here = 4 and counting (two were winos)

One hour sitting in Green Park at lunchtime has given me a huge munting headache, though. I bought a Calippo, and spent several minutes holding it to my forehead.

I'd always thought those 'London hotter than Barbados' stories were a load of shite, now I'm not so sure.

Cabbage, have a couple of sweeties and a few crisps, you'll leach out all the salt and sugar drinking that much water, and will get a terrible dehydration headache even though you're not dehydrated.

It's way too hot to read the Chuck Pahlaniuk book I've been assigned to review. time for another olive, another plum and another pigfucker glass of cold water.

I wonder if any of the tabloids or local news programmes are going to try frying an egg on the pavement. Phew Wot a Scorcher etc...

Humidity is usually in the 80-90% range here.

Next week will suck when I have to go back to school. There's usually no AC in my room and I'll have to wear grownup clothes. :(

Suzie - no worries sweets and crisps already eaten!

Aside - I don't believe I've ever seen anyone in those fountains before, except the odd drunkard. Have they been cleaned up and chlorinated and stuff now? No one seemed to be batting an eye at all the splash mentalism going on.

Earlier I was walking down Gray's Inn Road just wishing someone with a hosepipe or some cycle courier I know with one of those massive squirt guns would just fire water at me.

Cold shower time. I'm such a wuss.

the air-con is pretty good here! we even have someone who finds the office too cold!

Current nearest observations from the beeb (midday):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml?world=0008&links

!!!!!

I've been ill the whole damn DAY and... you're telling me if I ate CRISPS?!?!?!?

*explodes*

I am going to go home and try and fry an egg on the pavement.

I have finished work and should probably be out sunbathing but I don't feel like it esp. as I'm going to Devon at the weekend to be properly outdoors. So I am sitting in my surprisingly cool flat downloading tracks from 1975 instead.

There's a siren screech about every hour from the near-by firestation and a crotchy baby two gardens over who has just cried and cried and cried.

I need factor 60 and Jackie O shades everytime I leave the house (after burning slightly walking from my friend's house to the tube station on Sunday). The newsagent thinks I am mental. My housemate Steven has done nothing all day except lie prone in the garden. Damn him and his olive skin.

My front room has been cool so far but it's getting to the part of the day when the sun comes in through the windows, it's going to get nasty.

[CLOTHING STATE WHILE TYPING CENSORED FOR QUEASY READERS]

We had to go out and pay the rent - driving around at 2 this afternoon was mental, we started arguing over anything (eg the relative naffness of an oil painting of Carla Lane in a charity shop window) and then a minute later saying 'oh, it's the heat'.

http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/03772.html

news from the beeb:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3127669.stm

Seemed to peak at 35C around 3pm, yet there are weather stations on there claiming 38.8C (Reading; just about plausible) and 41.1C (Forest Hill; put it in the shade, dummies!).

A/C is bliss here in the office. Sudden shock of going outside at lunchtime only matched in memory by stepping out of Chester Cathedral after an hour or so of cool respite on Aug 2 1990 (check the records), or emerging from climate-controlled environs of Dulles Airport in July '99 to sticky 115F blanket.

The aircon on that thing was so fierce you'd start shivering when you got on it.

how am i coping, suzy. i'm not. I WANT AIR CONDITIONING YOU HEATHENS OF ENGLAND!

Seconded with great passion.

Been thinking about Ice Cold in Alex all day.

And don't they have gaps between the rails to cope with this anyway??

For those living in houses without air conditioning--buy one of those super huge fans (not the oscillating type) and put it in an open window. It will remove the hot air and bring in some cool. I suffered in the heat for weeks and finally bought a fan. I can't sleep without it.

Not looking forward to getting home to flat where windows only open a crack though. And for some reason unknown to science, one of our storage heaters TURNED ITSELF ON FULL in the night and when we got up the whole hallway was like a sauna!

I think it's peaked at 35.9C/96.6F Saturday looks like it may be hotter and might just reach 100f, I hope it does as I stand to win, oooh, pounds. (I have taken up giving money to the bookies as a fun activity)

Betting on the weather! A truly English pursuit.

Hoping for weeks of rain.

note, that even in seattle, this type of weather is REALLY odd for this time of year, but it is a complete prayer for all the firefighters in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Alberta, Idaho, and Montana who are trying to contain the largest fires in the region ever.

but hey, i'm on holiday. or something. i'd actually rather be at work cos then i could just go swimming whenever it got too hot to bear.

(having said all that it's not too bad, really, i deal ok with heat. i'd like it to be 10C cooler though.)

Come September, I will not be leaving a/c unless I positively have to, however.

Have just done a shower with a peppermint scrub and felt KOOL for about 60 seconds.

Spare a thought for an ex-colleague of mine whose place of work is a glorified Portakabin on a large industrial site; during the last mini-heatwave a few weeks back it reached 40C inside - that also happened to be the day the management decided to remove his team's water cooler "to save money" (yearly cost of water cooler expressed as percentage of departmental salary bill = 0.16%).

When his line manager complained the response was along the lines of "just be glad we didn't take away yr kitchen facilities, we're not obliged to provide them either" along with some guff about a certain senior manager's office reaching 45C and him not complaining. I suspect heat-fuelled mutiny today.

Current temp: 105F (40.5 Celsius) I need to do laundry but really don't want to have to walk out around back lugging it. With darkness. . .

Jesus. If my schools hadn't had A/C, I never would have graduated. It was hard enough to get me to show up. Show up and sit in a sweatbox?

I hope I haven't just jinxed UTA for the fall semester.

http://histclo.hispeed.com/image/fc/imad/la_redoute___roubaix_spring_summer_1966_page_161sm.jpg

And this week at least I'm working at a place with good air conditioning and where I can wear (nice) t-shirts and cropped trousers, instead of having to dress up -- my body rebels at the idea of trying to put on pantyhose. The only problem is that I'm working 2 to 10 again, and must drive to this place at the hottest, stickiest time of the day. It's NOT FUN to be caught in northern Virginia traffic in my little sweatbox of a car.

The worst is that I have to get up hideously early tomorrow morning and do manual labour in the heat. Which means I've had to jettison all plans of going to club freakytrigger as I would then DIE.

But I spent most of it waiting for my computer to *not* arrive, the fuckers. At least I got my monitor. I did lots of housework despite liquid dripping off me and adding to the necessary domestic chores. I'm not at all keen on cleaning my house at the best of times, but today was positively masochistic.

PLEASE KILL ME AND SAVE ME FROM THIS INFERNO

This is a health myth.

Water is sold as an elixir for your skin, hair and eyes, the cheapest way to stay looking healthy and younger. Drink enough of it, so popular theory goes, and water will boost flagging energy levels, rid your body of toxins, promote weight loss and fortify your immune system. The Natural Mineral Water Information Service, which represents the bottled water manufacturers of the UK, likes to reiterate the message that most of us are chronically dehydrated. Its most recent poll reports that only 10 per cent of the population drinks anywhere near enough water to remain healthy. By 'enough' it means the minimum eight glasses a day of water that has become the accepted statutory intake (although no one seems to know where that figure originated). But a growing body of evidence suggests that most people don't actually need anything like that much. Professor Heinz Valtin, a kidney specialist at Dartmouth University Medical School in the US, recently reviewed all recent clinical studies on water consumption and didn't find one that backed drinking such an amount. "The fact is that, potentially, there's harm even in water," says Valtin. "Even modest amounts can cause water intoxication once one's kidneys become unable to excrete enough urine."
Of course, we need to drink a certain amount to stay healthy. As a rule of thumb, the average adult loses about one litre of fluid (the equivalent of 4-6 glasses of water) per day through sweat and other bodily processes. In order to maintain normal functions, those losses need to be replaced but (and here's the crunch) not necessarily with water.
"Typically, we get a few glasses of water a day just from food, in particular from fruit and vegetables and soups which all have a high water content," says Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London "Then what people need to remember is that fluid is a general term and doesn't refer solely to water. Tea, coffee, squash and milk for children are all equally good fluid replacers. A lot of nonsense is spoken about water being the best way to hydrate, but it simply isn't true."
Ron Maughan, professor of human physiology at the University of Aberdeen Medical School, strongly agrees. "Any evidence that caffeine promotes the loss of water from the body has been greatly overplayed in recent years. It is not based on scientific fact," he says. "If you are already dehydrated and consume heavily caffeinated drinks, then there might be a very mild risk of it getting worse. But generally it makes no difference if people drink coffee, tea, cola or water."
Maughan and his colleagues have also looked at the effects of alcohol, considered to be another diuretic, and found that, in moderation, it too has little impact on the average person's state of fluid balance. His results, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, showed that alcoholic drinks with an alcohol content of less than 4 per cent such as light beer and lager can be used to stave off dehydration.
And if you are parched? Even if your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth, water is not the best you can get. In studies on endurance athletes and chronically dehydrated patients in hospital, drinks containing small amounts of body salts and a little carbohydrate were found to be more effectively absorbed from the gut than plain water. A sports drink (even orange squash with a pinch of table salt) will get you back into positive fluid balance far more quickly, says Maughan. The argument that a bit of the clear stuff is always the best just doesn't hold water.

There's a rather girlish breeze blowing today.

Christ, it sucks to be me.

Still chipper after 96 years

A woman celebrated her 96th birthday yesterday by frying fish and chips in the business she set up 75 years ago. Constance Brown set up Brown’s fish and chip shop in Pembroke, south-west Wales, with her husband, Sidney, and kept it going after he died in 1964.

that's the problem in a nutshell

Ten G&Ts (and a half, !!!, first for ages, walked around being Very Nice To People all night) later, free walkies into what seemed like all clubs in London's Trendy Hoxton, we find ourselves at a recording studio owner's birthday party where the coolest person there was an Indian girl dipped in glitter, wearing so little clothes but looking so jewel-encrusted that we all congratulated her for making such an effort (admit it, there's a coolest person there at any club and we ALL clock them) without looking like she'd gone for a roll on the floor at J Maskrey's studio. There was also:

"...why don't you listen to me/what is the problem baybee..."

blaring from whoknowswhere, a really noticeable Clinch of Ming two feet behind us (my term for an ugly couple on pills making out on dancefloor) and at home-time I savoured the dawn walk down Old Street for home and leapt into a cold shower once I got there. Then sleep.

Now I just got up and I'm drinking Coke and waiting for them lot on the radio to play the Lumidee record.

come now. dallas is miserable in the summer, yes. but the average relative humidity (morning/afternoon) is 81%/58%. for london it's 88%/66%. they're sufferin' mightily when it hits 97F there with no A/C to be found. i bet the movie theaters don't even have it.

if the temperature is above 90F the humidity will usually be around 50% and if it tops 100F then around 30%. if the humidity was above 80% and the temp was over 100F then the heat index would be 150-160F... many, many people would die.

oh yeah... high temp in austin on friday was 110F :)

Fortunately, our office is actually air conditioned today. Phew!

I want to listen to Breathe!

I almost, just now, swallowed the bug that flew into my mouth.

Sunblock fucks up the smell of Comme des Garçons fragrances and makes me break out.

(Commentator on World Cup just now has just reported over 100 degrees F in Kaiserslautern)

I spent 2 hours hacking back my lawn last night and my usually hardly existant hayfever has now gone bonkers.

what the hell is an ice lolly?

coping methods:
hair drying/straightening in the wee hours of the morning,
laying very still,
pineapple sorbet,
air conditioner temperature wars with pleasant plains,
bare feet,
sitting on the edge of the bathtub (bathroom is by far the coldest room in the house),
pretending it wont get worse (but it will).

also, i got a tan somehow. sucky.

(I think an ice lolly is a popsicle.)

Glasgow and surrounding seems to be particularly hayfever-unfriendly just now - the mister and Onimo were very sniffle-ridden on Saturday. I'm a bit snuffly just now, but the neighbours have been out cutting the grass and I've got all the windows open and the mister's taken the anti-histamines with him to work.

Today be stiflin'. Lovely A/C in here - even if it does have a tendency to give the staff chest infections.