It's not the heat, it's the hotness!
Thank the Gummi Mary, our power has stayed on during this last hurrah heatwave. It seems like only last year we had temperatures in the hundreds, and the Mansion was without power twice, for days at a time. Oh. It was only last year.
Our blacktop county road, now a major detour, is not faring well. It's like the elderly or toddler of thoroughfares. The extreme temperatures are taking a toll on that route. Just up the hill from our mailbox row, a blowout has occurred. It looks like a heavy truck had to hug the non-existent shoulder, and collapsed a crater of blacktop. It's a regular black hole. Chunks of asphalt line the edges like a mosaic. I pity the speed-demon fool who rushes in where I fear to tread T-Hoe's tires. Somebody's gonna flip.
The chickens just might be laying hard-boiled eggs.
Today during parking lot duty a car would not start. Of course it wouldn't. So several guys got together and rounded up some jumper cables and played Larry the Bewildered Cable Guy for fifteen minutes. I was a captive audience. I was almost a comatose audience. I had to go back to the building and stand in the recessed door alcove. It was about ten degrees cooler in the shade. After trying every possible permutation of cable color and battery post known to male adolescents, those fellas got that late-model jalopy a-rumblin'. I was free to seek intravenous fluids and a cooling blanket.
It's hotter 'n forty hecks out there.
I do car riders duty every afternoon, and it's a daily combination game of chicken and bumper cars. Cars going in all different directions, lots of close-calls, and teachers risking their lives in order to keep the kids safe.
ReplyDeleteGood times.
Oh! The humidity!
ReplyDeleteI have been on cross walk duty all week in the afternoon and in the gym during the morning. I babysit two students for about 10 minutes until the other students come, get my handy-dandy stop sign, and walk them across the street in the ped-x zone while the high schoolers go willy-nilly across the road. It seems between the summer of 8th and 9th grade they forget how to look both ways and what the white stripes on the road are for. One of my fellow teachers almost got ran over one day. It seems that drivers don't understand what that red sign is for either.
ReplyDeleteSioux,
ReplyDeleteWow! You elementary teachers have it made in the shade! Chickens! And bumper cars! Next you'll be telling me there's a Margarita fountain in the teacher's LOUNGE.
As for that life-risking business...well, it's what you do. Second nature. Without thinking. That's the kind of people who go into teaching. Not those bonbon-scarfing summertime layabouts who are only in it for the money and the prestige.
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knancy,
Oh! That comment! How I wish I had thought of it. It would have made a great title. See what you're missing without a blog? People can steal from you all willy-nilly and nobody is the wiser.
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Melissa,
One time our old librarian ran over a kid on his bicycle behind Basementia. Never mind that the kids weren't supposed to ride their bikes on the road back there. She knocked him off the bike, but he just waved her on. Because his bicycle was OK.