Philly’s pop-up gardens are such a cool concept, but Kay will be hunkered indoors until mid-September at least. Photo from VisitPhilly.Com

So, as most of our readers know, I grew up in Maine. I first came down here in 1996 in the end of August. To be honest, it didn’t seem that bad. Ok, it was really hot but I was absolutely delighted by the fact that summer extended through the end of October and that winters are so mild around here, despite the fact that that was the year that we got the three feet of snow in one snowstorm. I couldn’t believe that my workplace closed for three days that week! I also couldn’t believe that they had to use front-loaders and dump trucks to cart the snow away; I’d never lived in a place where streets don’t have places to store snow all winter and drains every 50 feet to take it away in the spring. (It was only later that I realized that the streets in Maine during the winter are almost never as bad as the streets here after a small snowstorm, much less a 3-footer.)

Then next summer came….

…oh…my…goodness. I cannot express how how hot it is around here for someone who came from up north. I stopped sleeping. My brain melted and dripped out my ears. I think I may have gone into a coma, or two, or three-I don’t really remember that summer. It was aggravated by the fact that my car didn’t have air conditioning because I’d never needed it before. I started saying that Philadelphia had five seasons: fall, winter, spring, summer & Hell. Fortunately for me, these days I have a house with AC, a car with AC, a lovely job with AC and a husband and dog that feel pretty much the same way about heat as I do. Still, I miss the outdoors. Caroline, our ILL person, talks about “flip-flop time.” I’m waiting for “sweater time.”

All of this goes some way to explaining why I don’t have an actual blog post this week. It’s too hot!

I have been reading. I’m halfway through The almost nearly perfect people : behind the myth of the Scandinavian utopia by Michael Booth, which is very good. In fact, I will probably review this on my next blog post because some of my ancestors are Swedish but I haven’t gotten to Sweden yet in the book, so it feels like I can’t comment yet. I’m also halfway through The joy of leaving your sh*t all over the place : the art of being messy by Jennifer McCartney, which turns out to be a parody of Spark joy : an illustrated master class on the art of organizing and tidying up by Marie Kondō,  and is just about as hilarious as the title indicates.

On Hoopla, I’ve checked out The Very Beast of Transylvania TV, which I’m enjoying, but I’m honestly not sure I can recommend it to the general viewer as it’s an interesting mix of The Office, the Twilight Zone, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Robot Chicken. If you can’t handle adult humor, really bad language, puerile jokes and sarcastic send-offs of 1960s sci-fi, this show is not for you. However to a certain kind of geek, of which I apparently am one, it’s absolutely hilarious. (You’ll note I’m not linking to it…Seriously, if you check it out, you have been warned!)

So…much like an episode of Seinfeld, this week’s blog post is about nothing in particular. If you like the heat, enjoy yourself! If you don’t, you can join me at the library in the artificial cool. Sweater time is coming soon!