Thursday, July 30, 2009

Scenes from a hot city

The temperature topped 100 degrees in Seattle yesterday. We’re so not used to it. A few pollyannas say they enjoy it, and loudly proclaim their newfound love affair with the sun. The rest of us walk around slowly, blinking and frowning, alternately cranky or bewildered.

The unrelenting heat is prompting questionable sartorial decisions. I saw my supervisor in a miniskirt. For every lithe young campus hottie running around in flip flops and cutoffs, there's the Rubenesque bare-chested old guy with sweat dripping off his wrinkled nipples.

An older manager at work abandoned his computer, rolled up a copy of the campus paper and chased around an errant fly.

29 Seattle-area friends on my facebook page posted about the weather. No more archly clever posts; we're recording triple digit temperatures in our kitchens, posting screen shots of KING5, and passing around beat-the-heat tips (water soaked headbands, running through sprinklers) .

On my bus, no one talks. No one's sleeping. We all have zombie stares, behind our shades. And overhead, the sun continues to shine.

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