Obviously, you need context. As a rural youth, I was raised by Fannie Farmer's younger, cooler cousin Susie Homemaker. She/we did everything ourselves, which included planting, weeding (eww, tomato worms) and harvesting the extensive garden's bounty. (Lest it sounds too bucolic, there were adolescent trees that provided minimal shade and our neighbors were few and far away.) While these things might have tasted amazing and wonderful and were bursting with healthy goodness, the price was sweltering for weeks in a hot and humid environment, pickling, boiling, canning, and preserving. Peaches. Pickles. Tomatoes. Corn. Peas. Applesauce. I think the pickles were the worst. I don't have a memory of it being an annual event, but once was enough--and is probably why I absolutely *loathe* the smell and taste of pickles.

Each had its own special misery: slipping the skins off (literally) boiling peaches under cold running water; removing the detrius out of the peas (from the tireless pea pickers who cleaned the fields in long swathes and left stinking piles of expelled peapods and stems) both before and after blanching; the work necessary to *get* the tomatoes to the canning stage; slicing acres of sweet corn off steaming cobs and skin turning stiff from the starches in the juice; pickles being, well, pickles, and having that hideous pickle-smell that was unbearable in the long humid nights of my childhood; picking the apples off the low-hanging branches, entering a scary world full of spiderwebs and tall grass and running them into the house where we were put to work mashing apples down into their delicious and most perfect form as steam billowed everywhere.

You may notice a theme here--I don't enjoy steam. I believe steam has its place, namely in a steamroom. While I'm sure my youthful skin enjoyed the multitude of facials I received, wearing glasses meant that I spent a lot of time incapable of sight.

*ANYWAY* The way to combat these morale-draining sessions was to blast loud Latin American music. Sergio Mendes. Harry Belafonte. Music to shake your butt to, music to put a little joy in your soul and a little spring in your very tired arms. So if humidity has me down, Harry Belafonte is my savior. There's nothing better than Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay-O! Daaaaaaaaaaaaay-o! Well, maybe Man Smart, but that's the smug feminist in me coming out. So back to the original point of all this...

I zapped my hair with some red, and because it's so short it sticks straight up and back like Nefertiti's famous hairdo. It stayed up there with a little help from the dye, and I danced around the house while I wait for it to brighten my hair back up. I turned off all the lights, went outside, and watched the lighting and thunder in an hour-long duet that would make Wagner proud. Then in to watch Master & Commander (still awesome, but in a small-screen sort of way) and fell asleep. I woke up to Day-O, which nicely bookended my dream of trying to get to Jamaica but I got stuck at the Lauderdale airport and couldn't get my connecting flight.

With today's weather, it's like I'm in Jamaica, but without the need for sunblock. It rained this afternoon and dropped 20 degrees. Seriously.

Twenty degrees.