As summer gears up, the heat is on!
It gets H.O.T. and stays hot here in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. As a rule, I like warm temps better than cold. But, I don’t like extreme heat, and I will complain with the best of them when we have day after day, week after week, of uncomfortably hot weather. Still, I feel more comfortable in warm to hot climates than cold climates. That is, as long as the temps are reasonable.
So, I’ve been thinking about the heat. As is typical of me, I started thinking of loosely related topics that explore heat in several different ways.
Take, for instance, my canvas bag. I have a carry bag which has a nice design on the front. I bought it at the beach. The bag has been treated with special technology, which makes the Plain-Jane off-white bag burst into color when sunlight touches it. How cool is that? I know it is kitschy, and the bag was probably over-priced, but I enjoy the bag every day that I carry it back and forth to school. Without exception, every day, when I step outside and the sunlight brings out the colors on my bag, I say, “Wow! Look at that!” You’d think I would be able to anticipate it.
Recently, I was running an errand in my car. When I got to the parking lot of the store, I tossed my canvas bag onto the passenger seat, then I slightly lowered the car windows to keep the air from getting too hot while I ran into the store. I spent a short amount of time shopping around. When I came back to my car, I was surprised to see what had happened to my bag. There was a small strip of color on my bag, activated by the sun. As I tried to figure out what was going on, I realized that although much of the bag was sitting in sunlight, the majority of that sunlight was coming through the car window. There was a tiny strip of unfiltered sunlight peeking through the gap in the window. Those rays, the ones that did not pass through the car window, were the rays that activated the sun-sensitive color on my bag. I surmised that the car window had been treated to block UVA or UVB rays. Those must be the sun rays that trigger the color technology. Is that an interesting experiment, or what? Way to go Sun! Way to go Auto Makers! Way to go Canvas Bag Innovators! It doesn’t take much to excite me.
In fleshing out more of the HOT theme, I started thinking about body heat, specifically Hot Flashes. Now you might be too young or the wrong gender to know much about hot flashes. But, those of us females who are advanced middle aged know all too well about them. Let me try to paint a picture for you. Have you ever woken up in the night, feeling very hot, feverish, and miserable, and instantly realized that you were sick, really sick? Well, imagine that you are having a normal day, carrying about with business, perhaps sitting at the desk working, or driving your car, or conducting a meeting, or walking through the store, or any regular mundane thing that you do. Imagine, that suddenly you feel that hot, miserable feeling that makes you realize that things are bad, and you are sick, sick, sick. Like 104 degree fever sick. That’s what a hot flash is like. It comes suddenly from within and instantly fills your body, as if making the “FWUMP” sound of a gas burner when it’s turned on at the stove. When you first have hot flashes, they are unnerving, because you feel alarmed that something very different is happening. How could you develop such a high fever so quickly out of the blue? Well, see, it’s not a fever, it’s a hot flash.
Level-headed victims learn to relax and wait the hot flash out, because it usually doesn’t last long. Others, like me, tend to overreact. I run around like a chicken with its head cut off, stripping off whatever clothes I can without getting arrested, heading for the closest freezer to dig around and grab as many ice packs as I can carry at once. I moan and groan and wonder why on Earth women have to go through this. OK, you medical types, put your hands down. I don’t need you to explain to me the physiology behind it. I don’t really care. I’m just looking for sympathy from people who aren’t having a hot flash when I am having one. Act like you care. As it goes, I will contend that hot flashes are way better than the opposite would be. I cannot even imagine how I would cope if I suffered a cold flash. If my body started having an icy fit, I’m sure I would literally freeze and give up. I guess the hot flash ain’t so bad, after all.
So, back to the weather. Is it hot? Well, Captain Obvious, that’s a resounding YES! Where I live, it will be hot for months. But, the tantalizing promise of weather is that the temperatures will eventually start to cool, and that change in weather is the sweet reward for suffering through the heat. You see, if it weren’t for the heat, I don’t think we could appreciate the cold, and vice-versa. Scientifically, I’m told that cold is actually measured as the absence of heat. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that heat always flows from hot objects to cold objects. When a cup of coffee cools down, the heat energy is transferred to the surrounding area, including the air. When a bowl of ice cream melts, the ice cream absorbs the warmer energy from the air. Thus, we have the yin and the yang of temperatures—hot and cold. You can't have one without the other.
Whether we like hot temps or not, we repeatedly find ourselves navigating through them. When we’ve reached our limit, how should we deal with these Hot Topics? I don’t know, you tell me. A shady spot and a nice cool drink? Maybe. Thank goodness for air conditioning. But, I do know that in summer, as legendary blues singer Bessie Smith would say, “There’ll Be A Hot Time in The Old Town Tonight.”
