Hot! Tired! Cranky!

We're having our first heatwave of the season here this week. It reached the high eighties yesterday and the mid to high nineties today and tomorrow is expected to hit the triple digits. I can barely stand the heat coming off my laptop keyboard.

It wouldn't be so bad if it had crept up by increments over the last couple months but we were in the mid seventies last weekend and the nights still cooled to the low fifties and lower in some parts of the valley. It was a long cool spring by our usual standards.

I might be handling it better if I hadn't woken at five this morning because I fell asleep before nine last night.

I knew I should have done my post this morning! While it was still cool and I was feeling ambitious and somewhat energetic.

Instead, I used those hours to read another chapter in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. A library book that was due Monday but which I held onto because I was in the middle of a chapter when Ed made the library run for me Monday afternoon. He was going to take it back the next morning but decided not to. So I made sure to read another chapter. And another. After all, if you are renting a book for twenty cents per day you might as well read twenty cents worth of pages.

This was a book that I had been on a waiting list for weeks, maybe months. And my turn came while I was still sick with the flu. This is a dense, footnoted academic treatise. Not quick reading. I was plowing through it at about ten pages an hour. There are sixteen people in line behind me now. And only the one copy in the system you can reserve. The local college library is part of the county library system and has a copy but I suspect it is being reserved for students in a class. If everyone takes a full three weeks with it I won't get another turn this year.

I didn't spend the entire morning reading that book though. I spent some time getting other books ready to go to the library because Ed had the day off and we were planning to head to the library at ten to get that overdue book in the drop box before they opened at eleven and maybe not be fined for Wednesday, a day our Phoenix branch isn't open. While preparing books going back, I decided to be ruthless with the ones I'd had had for over six weeks already--renewed twice in other words--and were coming due over the next ten days, meaning though the Monday after next. Especially all novels and all NF that wasn't fairly light reading and short. That meant most all of the Shakespeare materials checked out before I got sick. I had ordered all those books in February when my ambition and energy was high; before two colds, a jarring fall and three weeks with the flu zapped me. of the energy if not the ambition.

I had a particular motive for paring down the library books, divesting myself of due dates for the next week and a half or so. I am determined to return to the novel I began in October and set aside over three-hundred pages into it (just over half way!) on the first of November for NaNoWriMo. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I raved about it here in October. I was reading it for many of the hours of the Read-a-Thon in late October. I was loving it. And then...

Ed and I did reach the library nearly an hour before it opened and we took books to read while we waited. I took The Historian. Between that forty minutes or so and another hour or so after we got back home and before the heat stupor hit me, I read nearly fifty pages. I had to start over. But I don't mind. The prose is delicious like the exotic cuisine Kostovo folds into the story at every turn.

Well it is eleven o'clock and I've been ready to sleep since eight. But I still need to go wash the dishes. I just couldn't bear it after dinner was over at seven. I think it might be doable now. At least more so and I don't want it hanging over me for the start of my day tomorrow. Bleh. That would be worse than sweating over them a little now.