Cool tropical weather...

It's been awhile since I wrote, though not for lack of things to write about!

It's been one of those rare cool spells here, dark and gloomy and threatening to rain any minute. I have actually been wearing a sweatshirt to bed for over a week now! The weather is due to a series of "wind convergences" or "low pressure areas". Locals complain of being cold, but even I have hardly broken a sweat all week and indeed sometimes feel downright chilly. It's amazing becase I haven't seen my thermometer go below 79F!

At times like this the price of fish soars - the fishermen don't like to go out in the rain especially if it's windy. It's also a really bad time to try to go snorkeling. Though we are in the tropics and close enough to the equator to be out of the typhoon belt, the ocean currents at this time of year can be chilly. I have snorkeled at this time of year in the past and gotten so cold that coming out of the water and sitting in wet clothes in the rain in a breeze felt warm by comparison!

I hear from the country south of here that they too have had a lot of rain recently and everybody's sick (colds).

I guess we have indeed gotten the La Nina they promised a few months ago would follow the dry El Nino last year. I certainly am enjoying the cooler weather and best of all, there have been no power interruptions for a long time!

New Year's Eve

It is New Year's Eve. I was awakened this morning by a pig squealing. Lots of pigs are meeting their demise today to be spitted and roasted for the holiday.

My house helper and her friend are spending the holiday here keeping me company - and borrowing our kitchen. Last night they went shopping and came home and packed a box of goodies to send to their families in the countryside. They included things like small cans of meat and fish, a big bag of candy, packages of instant coffee, milk, and Milo, sugar, laundry detergent, soap, shampoo sachets, etc. They also included the makings for a favorite holiday specialty - macaroni salad. It's made of cooked macaroni, fruit cocktail, sweetened condensed milk, processed cheese, and a bit of mayonnaise. They also planned to send about 2 kilos of roast pork left over from the friend's Christmas party at work. They left early this morning bringing the box to the bus terminal to send home with a family member they met there.

Now they are busy in the kitchen making cupcakes and fried noodles. They have two loaves of sliced white bread and apparently plan to make fried noodle sandwiches with it. They will also make spaghetti for a relative who will be stopping by later for some cupcakes.

This evening they will watch movies on an old laptop, eating fried noodle sandwiches and cupcakes, until midnight when the whole city will be outside making racket to welcome in the new year.

As for me, I am writing emails, updating my blog, and pondering life around me. I, however, do NOT plan to eat noodle sandwiches! :-)

Wishing you a happy New Year!

Coping with brownouts

The past several months have been much drier than usual due to an El Nino. This island normally gets most of its power from hydroelectric sources but this year the water levels were extremely low resulting in power shortages. In this city they have managed to organize the brownouts such that you can sort of plan your day. The city is divided into three groups which have a rotating schedule of brownouts, not to the exact time but the general part of the day. In my part of town on Mondays and Tuesdays we are scheduled for afternoon brownout of 2-3 hours duration. Wednesdays and Thursdays we have them in the early evening. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays we have them in the morning.

It does interfere with work since it’s too dark inside our house to read or see the computer keyboard, and my second monitor doesn’t work. If we have a brownout in the morning I often use that time to go shopping or do errands because the malls all have their own generators. Or I might go to our office which is on a different rotation schedule. There I can check the mail or photocopy or use the library. When we have an afternoon brownout that is when it is the most difficult because it is not only dark but also very hot. Sometimes if I’m sleepy I take a nap on the cool tile floor. Or else I just sit and sweat and listen to a pre-downloaded mp3 radio broadcast or sermon while playing a mindless computer game until the power comes on. When the power goes off in the evening, I light 3-4 candles, power up the mp3 player and hike laps around the kitchen and living room for an hour.

It has been raining again recently so we hope that eventually the reservoirs will fill up and the power will become more regular.

BREAKING: They just announced a change in the schedule. To be more "equitable" the schedule will change every week. Sigh! Just get a system figured out and they go and change it again.

Green energy woes

It seems that we really are having an El Nino this year. We seem to alternate years, nothing normal anymore, just El Ninos and La Ninas. It hasn't been raining daily like it usually does and we have had to water the plants a couple times a week lately. We are told that the lake and river which provide almost all the power on this island are very low and so power has been cut back. Luckily this city has an old 40 MW Bunker-fuel plant as well that has helped pick up some of the slack. It is located less than a kilometer from our place and it has been running almost constantly for the last 3 weeks. It is extremely noisy and even at this distance there is a low pitched background thrumming that kind of gives you a headache after awhile. In fact, one of our neighbors is out house hunting right now because he can't sleep. He says not only is it noisy but it shakes the ground and even using ear plugs and closing windows and using air conditioner don't help. So they are scouting out a neighborhood out past the airport.

Today the power company said the allotment of hydro-electric power has been cut even more so they will have to start rotating brownouts of about 30 minutes duration. The local generator can be cranked up to 53 MW temporarily and when it does it REALLY gets noisy! But it can't sustain that level so eventually it drops back to 40MW and the noise subsides - a little.

So much for our green energy.

August-September notes

August 2009

Well it’s another hot one. Maybe there really is an El Ninyo forming. Last week the sky was brilliantly clear but this week it has that hazy, dusty tinge it gets when the fires on the next island are burning (the annual "smokey" season - see entries from Oct-Nov 2006, July 2007). It has been raining a little but just enough to increase the humidity, not great gully-washing, roof-pounding rains that would actually cool things down.

I am teaching English in the heat of the day, from 11:00-2pm this week and next. That means I have to dress professionally (read: hot). I’m commuting from the village which means wearing a jacket too for sun protection. The commuting is actually not too bad. It is the month of fasting so traffic from the rural areas at least is really light at the times I travel, tho if I spend too long doing errands and come back after 4pm it can be rather heavy as people come out to do shopping, etc. The light traffic makes for a more pleasant commute. Traffic picks up significantly at the city limits, but since I only have to go to as far as the school, it’s not so crazy as it gets further into town.

The temporary wooden-coconut log bridge is showing signs of age and breaking at the edges but still seems safe enough for a motorbike. It’s definitely cooler in the village – not that it is cool but it is not as hot as the city. There have continued to be lots of power outages. It’s a lot more bearable out here without power than in a hot, closed up city house without power! This morning I’m actually still feeling slightly chilled with a fan at 6:15 am. According to my alarm clock it is 81 degrees. Hmmmm.

(Temporary coconut log bridge collapsed a few days before I left. Luckily not with me on it!)

Something in my lower back/waist got pulled on the trip, either from sitting so long in weird seats or possibly hoisting luggage. Domestic airlines use new contoured-for-Asian-sized seats where the "pillow" part usually hits me between the shoulder blades. The seats are also closer together so that more passengers can be crammed into the plane. If my knees aren't jammed into the seat ahead, they have to be sideways. Makes for cramped sitting. Anyhow, something got strained. Over the course of the day my back gets more and more cramped and stiff and after standing teaching for 3 hours it is downright uncomfortable. Two days ago I started sleeping on the floor. It does seem to help. Even tho the mattress on the new bed is hard, it has springs or something and maybe that little amount of shaking and movement keeps things off balance in the spine department. I also broke down and took mefanamic acid (Ponstan) last night. This morning it still feels slightly cramped/spasmed in the area but not exactly painful so that’s good. Maybe today will be better.

This country is admittedly not good for my back. Even my motorbike is a tad too short and I can’t quite sit up straight and still reach the handlebars. Mirrors if any are too low, even the new ATMs I have to bend way down to even see the keypad! Tables and seats tend to be short and I have to make a concerted effort to sit up and not hunch over. I think I have developed the habit of hunching down to fit the furniture...

September 2009

I am in the village. Friday I finished the last English class. After class I bought a new printer for one of the teams and brought it home pinched between my knees on the motorbike. Yesterday (Saturday) I set it up and printed one sheet and then it started complaining of a paper jam. (And there is no paper jam.) Nothing I do changes it and so it won't print anything, just keeps wanting somebody to clear the nonexistant paper jam. So I will have to haul the thing back to town and see if they can fix it. Sigh!

While sitting on the floor intently focusing on the printer, a kitten playing on the bed next to me decided the flashing light on my glasses was cool so he swatted at it and got a claw in my eye. Ow! Fortunately I have a tube of not-yet-expired terramycin eye ointment. Half my eye is bloody but it's not very painful and I can still see ok. So picture me tomorrow riding my motorbike squinting thru one eye with a printer in a box balanced on my knees or squeezed between my knees or something. Whoo hoo!

When life gives you floods go swimming

It seems we are getting lots of experience these days with utility failures. Yesterday afternoon I returned home in another torrential downpour. This time I had taken my flip flops along so I wore them home in the rain. That way I could wade in the water and not ruin my shoes. Nothing was deeper than mid-calf and I was able to find a taxi waiting on the other side of the worst part. The driver complained all the way about all the flooding and traffic. I tried to cheer him up by reminding him how much worse the capital city would be and he did indeed brighten considerably thinking about that!

When I arived home there was no electricity. Apparently a coconut tree had fallen and snapped some wires near our place. Like I said yesterday, falling trees is one of the common results of too much rain. Anyway I tried to light our old kerosene lamp but realized in time that it now leaks. So I decided to light candles instead and then stumbled around trying to get things put away.

The power eventually came back on, but this morning the telephone doesn’t work, nor the internet. I called a friend on my cellphone so they are going to call the phone company for me and report it.

Meanwhile the poor garden is a mess of smashed plants and flower pots but the huge limb that fell has been mostly cleared out and it turns out it didn’t damage the roof or the wall it was balanced on. Even though it’s disheartening to look at the mess in the garden, it’s probably good in the long run. Now it will have more sunshine. Almost everything will have to be cut back which will allow for new growth. Some things will have to be replanted and some replaced. A lot of plants around here can be propagated by trimming the stem of a broken-off piece and replanting it. So you can end up with more than you started with.

Maybe in the same way all the storms and hassles of life, the big and the little can bring some good to us too. I like the attitude of these kids: When life gives you floods go swimming! -->

* Pictures swiped from local paper.

The trees are falling

This afternoon I was jerked to attention by a loud, drawn-out, tearing, rumbling crash and an earth-shaking thud. After peeking out the window and seeing nothing obvious I ran to the door to see what on earth had happened. Apparently an ancient moss covered mango tree in the lot next to our building had fallen. It must have been cut down on purpose though I don't recall hearing chopping.

An hour later a tremendous downpour started up with thunder and even wind. Soon there was another drawn-out tearing crash. But this time it was in our back yard and it was NOT on purpose!

A HUGE chunk of our tropical almond tree had broken off and rebounded off the concrete wall and broken into more pieces. Big branches are suspended on our wire clotheslines, others are balanced on the concrete wall and extending over to the the neighbor's roof and some small ones even up on the the second floor roof. But what a perfect fall! It couldn't have fallen better if somebody had tried! The biggest part fell vertically right next to the base of the trunk. (I couldn't get back there to take a picture cuz of the rain - plus there's a lot more of the tree still standing!) The weight of the branch on the neighbor's roof is resting mostly on the concrete wall - not on the roof.

We've been asking to have the tree cut back for a couple of years. But I doubt they would have cut it as well as this! Since it is still raining and almost sunset we'll have to wait until tomorrow to start cleaning up the mess.

This is another sort of thing that happens when the ITCZ meets up with the Tropical Wave.

When the ITCZ meets the Tropical Wave

One of the things I miss living in the second and third of my worlds is the Weather Channel. Of course weather around here is pretty predicatable, at least temperatures stay within a narrow range and precipitation is of one kind only. After all this time I was excited to have found a scientific explanation for what local weather we do have. Sort of. Weather here seems to be driven by two main things: the Intertropical convergence zone and Tropical waves.

The Intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) is basically a band of clouds and thunderstorms that circles the globe near the equator. It is where the trade winds of the Northern and Southern hemispheres meet. It moves north and south with the seasons. (Red represents July, blue January, though obviously not this year!)

Tropical waves are the bottom edges of elongated high pressure ridges that move across the oceans from east to west. The bottom edges get kind of ragged and unstable and tend to produce a lot of rain and it is thought that they can also be instrumental in producing hurricanes and typhoons.

So what happens when a Tropical Wave meets up with the ITCZ? Well, I think we are finding out! We had a lot of rain last week and I once again realized the disadvantages of small umbrellas. The heavy rain continues this week. The other night it poured all night long after having poured all evening. There was flooding in many parts of the city, which isn't unusual but this time they even cancelled school in some areas! Our new neighbor found out what we meant by the flooding garage under his place. Thankfully his little sedan still started this morning.

Dripping

It’s that time of year when the humidity gets so high it just falls out of the sky as rain. Last month I was attending an evening funeral service. It was outdoors and the sun had already set but it was still incredibly hot. Everybody was wet with perspiration just sitting there doing nothing. Suddenly in the middle of the service it seemed that the air saturation hit 100% and condensed into rain. It was like the sky just suddenly dropped all its moisture in the form of an exceedingly hard downpour. No thunder, no lightening, no wind, no warning. Wham! And soon it was over.

The same thing has been happening here this week. Last night for example, I was standing outside watching the cat eat. Doing nothing. Just standing there. Perspiration was just welling up and running in rivers down my face, neck, arms, back, everywhere. Not too long afterwards the sky opened up and dumped an incredibly torrential downpour. Again, no thunder, no lightning, no wind, no sprinkling, no warning. Wham! It didn’t last more than 10-15 minutes but it was an incredible amount of water.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if you bathed in an antiperspirant? Would your body blow like a volcano because the sweat couldn’t come out??? It sure would be interesting to try it and see. Maybe one of these days I will – some time when I am sure the water won’t go off in case I need an emergency bath!

And that brings up another thing. Days like these do make me wonder about this common sports drink sold around Asia, like, uh, exactly what is in it????? Is this even appetizing???? Maybe you enjoy it better if you don't speak English????

Delights of high humidity

Ah, the delights of high humidity! Soon after landing in the third of my worlds I could feel my freeze-dried nose and airways beginning to heal. No more bloody nose. No more chapped lips. No more need for body or hand lotion. Even my Velcro fingers have finally healed! Now it’s back to two showers a day and using a thin towel so that it has a chance to dry in between.

It’s also wonderful to be able to touch things like doorknobs and computers without a jolt of static electricity. I wonder how long it would have taken Ben Franklin to study electricity if he had lived here instead?

It is amazing how much easier it is to move around when you don’t have six or eight layers of clothing on. More than once I felt like that little kid in the movie who was so stiff from his big fat snowsuit that when he fell over in the snow he couldn’t get up and had to just lay there and cry for help!

Oh, and I brought back a thermometer so that I can tell you what the temperature is in Fahrenheit. It is currently 81 degrees in my office, pleasantly cool with a fan (but with exertion and no fan, enough to make you sweat!)

Winter

Winter is definitely here. There’s at least 12 inches of it on the ground and more in the air. It is colder than when I first arrived so I am adding layers to the layers. (If this keeps up I’ll soon be too fat to walk!) I am told that one of the Eskimo languages has 14 words for snow. Here we just use descriptive phrases since English has only one word so we add words like powdery, fluffy, wet, hard and dry. Sometimes it is sloppy to walk in, other times it is soft and quiets everything. But when it gets really cold it squeaks and can make the world pretty noisy.
 

Driving becomes interesting too and can be very much more time-consuming. Everyone slows down a little when it is snowing, and you would think that traffic would move along at a slightly slower speed, but for some reason when everybody’s “slowing down a little” is added up it becomes gridlock. I am sure there must be some obscure mathematical formula involved....

It's cold!

I have now arrived in the first of my worlds, am pretty much over jet lag, and can finally connect to the internet. (Now the challenge will be to try to keep warm enough that my fingers won’t be too stiff to type!) My first impression was that I was arriving in a police state. There were signs up as we approached the immigration hall announcing that we were entering a federal something-or-other zone and no cell phones, cameras, recording devices were permitted to be used while in the zone. We lined up and even the citizens’ line which is usually fast-moving was real slow. We also got to watch a couple of officials, hands on hip, chew out an Asian-looking guy. Real welcoming sight....

After being duly intimidated, we got to pick up our luggage and waltz thru customs and on out into the frigid rain. Brrr!

Did I mention that it was cold? One way to keep warm is to keep moving. And that is what I have done, getting back into the swing of driving at high speeds in the rain on the right side of the road, and visiting folk, going to a conference, grocery shopping, etc.

Not only is it cold, it is dark. Now that I am over jet lag I will have to use an alarm clock if I hope to get up at a reasonable time! After years of using the sun as a clock, it's a bit disorienting to have such a short day! And it will only get shorter!!

Tides

Something really weird is going on. The tides have been very unusually high recently on the western end of the Indian Ocean – that includes the western and southwestern edges of Indonesia (the south coasts of Bali and Java) and includes the areas hit by the tsunami, the west coast of Sumatra, the Andaman Islands (owned by India) and the west coast of Thailand. In some areas in Java, people’s houses which had never flooded before were flooded 3 feet deep. They say it's in part because of the moon and maybe the SW monsoons, and maybe low pressure area. But they also say it's never been that high before. But why isn't the north side of Bali or the east side of Sumatra also having high tides???? Isn't the tide basically water sloshing back and forth? How come it's high only in certain areas???? The moon is full everywhere....

Floods

Monday May 7, 2007
Today it looked like more rain so I hurried and put on my soggy shoes and went into town as I had several errands to run. I left my computer at a friend’s house and then headed off to meet somebody I needed to see. When I got to that part of town there were police everywhere, traffic was crawling, and lots of people were standing out on the road. I wondered if there had been another bombing! When I got to the office I asked what had happened and they said that the neighborhood between there and the river were flooding. As I crossed the bridge on the way to the next stop I was apalled at how huge the river had become. I have never seen it that full. It was near the top of the concrete retaining walls that were built a few years ago. Apparently the tide was coming in at the same time the river was carrying all that water from the previous days’ rain. Downstream from the bridge towards the sea there were giant waves like you’d see in the sea. Police were on the bridge waving traffic on and telling people not to stop. The sidewalks were full of gawkers. The little mosque on the river’s edge on the other side was just about to flood. When I crossed back again a couple of hours later, about noon, there was water filling the street just before the bridge, you had to pass through it to get to the bridge. The concrete retaining walls were only a few inches above the water and were breaking in several places, you could see water pouring over the broken places.

Later I heard that my friend’s house - which had never flooded before - was thigh deep in water. The water had started coming up about 6:30 in the morning as she was getting the kids off to school and getting herself ready to go off to teach. She texted her brother to come to town and help, so he went to town with his car. He had to park it on the main road but they were able to wade out and load up some things to take to a niece’s house. Other things they stuck up above the ceiling. He said there were other houses flooded much deeper. He saw all kinds of debris being carried along including motorcycles, refrigerators, and even a wardrobe tumbling along in the current. The police tied 3 ropes across a place with a particularly strong current so that any people being carried away could grab the rope, if they missed it there was a second and a third rope they could try for. Meanwhile police were on standby with a boat and rubber inner tubes to help rescue people. (I was impressed to hear that they actually were doing something useful for a change!) People were saying what a good thing it happened in the daytime and not at night. And also a mercy that the sky cleared up and it didn’t rain anymore.

Unfortunately my friend put her cellphone in her pocket and then forgot about it as she was in and out of waist deep water salvaging their things. So the cellphone is now ruined.

The nearby Salvation Army office was putting up a tent and getting organized to cook rice and noodles for lunch for flood victims. Some of their staff were busy helping people rescue their things, or accompanying any injured to the nearby hospital. They expect the water to be high for a couple of days and then there will be a huge mess to clean up. One lady I talked to said rather heartlessly that it wasn’t really a humanitarian crisis, that those people shouldn’t have built their houses so close to the river. Maybe so, but on the other hand this IS the worst flood ever. Many of those places have never flooded before. I suppose all the chopping down of forest up stream also contributed significantly.

More Rain

(for Sunday May-6)

Today we went on my motorbike up the mountains to visit some folk in another village. The thing I especially like about driving a motorbike is that I can sit up stright! I can also enjoy the scenery better because you have a pretty unlimited range of vision. Amazingly, none of the folk I wanted to see were there. Some seemed to have gone off to a wedding in a remote area, and others???? We had planned to go to another village too but it started raining and the clouds were hanging low, completely covering the mountains. It looked like it was going to rain all day so we decided to just head back home. There’s a stretch of hairpin curves that is especially prone to landslides so it seemed better to not wait, because the more it rained, the more likely a landslide would be. It rained hard the entire way back, I had to stop several times to clean the fog from my goggles. We had rain ponchos but they don’t cover your legs and so eventually the water soaks its way up your pant legs. Since I was driving and got the rain pelting in my face (no windshield), the water also drips down the front of your neck and inside the poncho so eventually you are wet all over. Arriving home in the valley it was raining hard there too and was unusually cool. In fact I was getting down right cold what with the wet clothes and all. It rained all that afternoon and night and since the power went off at sunset everybody just went to bed.

Rain

28-April 07

Went to a home service this afternoon. (They have them on Saturday afternoons to get ready for Sunday.) Rural houses can have some pretty interesting decore. Like this house – pictures of Jesus alternating with pictures of sweet young chesty things on all four walls of the living room. We as guests sat in aqua plastic arm chairs with garish flower pattern in the plastic. There weren’t enough fancy chairs for everyone so others sat on wood benches or on regular plastic stacking chairs borrowed for the occasion.

It continues to rain heavily every day, most every afternoon and evening. When it rains a lot the water gets cloudy. The bath water today looked like coffee with milk. Even the drinking water (which is boiled to sanitize it) looked like weak tea. (Maybe that’s why people here drink so much coffee? Aside from the fact that they grow it themselves!) It has been overcast and seems dark all the time. This village has power every evening from 6pm-12pm but I am usually so tired I can only benefit from about three hours of light

Landslide

4-24

I did finally get picked up on Monday at almost 6pm after waiting at the same place about 2 hours again. The trip was an adventure. We didn't get going until almost sunset so much of the trip was in the dark. Way past the farthest village I usually go to we had to stop because the road had become a raging river with big stones and all. We backed up about 1/4 mile to a dry spot and waited about 45 minutes to see if the water would go down. It did, we saw a couple of vehicles coming from the opposite direction so the driver knew it was passable. He paid a couple of guys about 15 cents to trot ahead of us so the driver could judge deepness and more or less which way to go, avoiding the biggest rocks. (This in a 4-wheel drive vehicle). About an hour later we came to a landslide in the middle of the forest. We were parked about an hour when the driver came back and said it would be awhile yet. I was just trying to get myself psyched up to maybe have to spend the night sitting in the car holding my computer. We were in the middle of the forest with no houses nearby, and it was raining. All of a sudden I heard somebody call my name. It was two guys from the village I was heading to!! They had driven down from their village and parked on the other side of the landslide. They helped carry my bag and computer. I felt a bit like being miraculously and unexpectedly led out of prison in the middle of the night as I bid my travelling companions good bye and we slogged barefoot through the mud of the landslide. I could see then that it was going to take a LONG time to clear They had cleared enough for a motorcycle to go through and that was still mid-calf deep in mud. The rest was nearly waist deep. On the other side we climbed into a small pick up and began the last hour of the journey. My feet were coated in mud halfway to my knees but as it dried it was like wearing boots- kept my feet warm. So a bit after 1am, I finally arrived. (The car I had been travelling in didn't get through the landslide until about 9am the next morning! Did I mention that it was carrying several jerrycans of gas and the fumes were a wee bit strong? Was feeling a bit toxic already.)

It has rained heavily parts of every day. It's cool but not frigid. You can easily wear your clothes 2 days in a row without smelling :-) But my feet are rotting from being wet all the time. The checking is going well and we should be able to finish on Wednesday. SO I should be able to leave on Thursday. Hopefully the return trip will be less adventurous than the going trip.

Summer

It is summer. Schools here are on vacation. This has several implications for life over the next couple of months.

1) Traffic is considerably less congested because school kids aren’t going to and from school morning and afternoon, nor home for lunch.
2) Lines at the supermarket aren’t so long now at noon. During the school year kids flood into the stores over the lunch hour to buy junk food and junk drinks, just at the time the cashiers are taking off for their lunch breaks.
3) Jay walkers are all over the place so driving bcomes more hazardous.
4) It’s quieter in the early morning and the water pressure is stronger because fewer people are trying to bathe and wash clothes at the same time.
5) During the day it can be much noisier as kids are out and about all day. One neighbor’s grandson has apparently moved in for the holiday with his electric guitar which he practices all day long. He certainly does need the practice since what he plays is not exactly pleasant to listen to, (no recognizable notes or rhythm) but I sure wish he would turn the volume down a bit! (Is it legitimate to pray for a brownout??)
6) Some places, such as churches, are less crowded because many people are out of town, but other places, like beaches, are more crowded.

If it is hot people say it’s because it is summer. If it is rainy people say it is because it is summer. My personal observation is that it is always summer – it is always hot and rains often. But at this time of year you can hear people advising us to be sure to drink a lot because it is summer. Be sure to keep cool and bathe often. There is a special watermelon and menthol shampoo that is sold only in the summer. Advertisements for junk drinks center around it being summer. Ads for hair and skin care do too.


So, it is summer. Deal with it.