Summers in Florida are the reasons why we have snowbirds. Heat, hurricane season, humidity, and rain. We wake up to 80 degree temps that climb higher and higher as the day goes on. I take the dog outside to walk down the street and come home soaked and ready to jump into the pool. Leave your car in the sun while you run into the store and you come back to a death trap. This year we have an abundance of mosquitoes due to a week of rainfall that apparently tempted the little buggers to our area and now they won't leave. Welcome to summers in Florida.
This summer I'm not getting an escape to cooler weather, and suddenly I'm noticing more and more reasons why I need to get out of here in June, July and August. Below are some of our summer woes here in the sunny state:
#1 - Turning on an oven - Thirty minutes of baking can dissolve me into a puddle and take away my appetite faster than the thought of eating a mushroom. If I have to use the oven, I make sure to stuff that sucker full of anything and everything. Baking dinner? Then we will have garlic bread, corn muffins, cake and brownies to go with. Lately, I've been researching crock pot summer meals. Where northerners use their crock pots in the winter to warm up their bellies from sleet and snow, we Floridians use it to avoid turning on our kitchen appliances.
The first meal I shoved into the pot was chicken and potatoes. I turned it on high, and when the girls came home from work asking if dinner was ready I raised the crock pot lid to dish it out only to find that I had not plugged in the magic maker. I blamed my husband who had wrapped the cord around the pot after cleaning it. Normally the cord dangles as I carry it from its place in a cabinet in my garage and it hooks itself on the door or on my baker's rack, reminding me to plug it in. I had to dump the meal. Raw chicken after five hours isn't something you save.
I made the same meal the next day after sending Madison to the grocery for more chicken. (Boy, am I enjoying having two extra drivers to run errands) I had a lot of help from SnapChat, texts, and my family reminding me to plug in the crock pot. I did and the meal was a success and all done without igniting my kitchen.
#2 - Keeping the pool clean - Two words - mustard algae. I had no idea what this stuff was when I moved here, but I got acquainted quickly when I opened the pool one morning at work to discover the bottom completely covered by a yellow sheen of what looked like dirt. This algae grows in shady spots of the pool usually the sides and the corners that are hidden from the sun. It creeps into pools in the summer months, and since it laughs in the face of chlorine you have to be on top of this stuff before it takes over the pool. We made the mistake of not checking our pool for a day and a half and the yellow monster kept us out of the water for a week. A week without a pool in the summer months of Florida? Deadly.
We also can't keep up with the chlorine. The heat and the sun is eating it up faster than we can pour it in. We have a container of it floating around with tablets inside that are suppose to slowly dissolve and stabilize along with the liquid, but is is worthless. We've tried three tablets, two tablets, one tablet and still we have zero chlorine in our pool. Coming from swimming and working in a pool in Indiana that was ass backwards and constantly out of whack, I have no problem wading through algae and liquid chlorine, but my husband freaks out so badly that I stay out of it when he is around. Not to mention, that the older I get the more things bother me and so when I am in the pool when he isn't around I don't go under.
#3 - Surviving the rain - Don't mistake it. We need the rain and thus we welcome it, but rain in Florida is crazy. It comes upon us without warning. One minute the sun is blaring down on our house and the next minute a black cloud is covering it and thunder is grumbling loudly. The cloud is only over my house and the rest of the sky is clear and beautiful. It can rain on one side of my street, but not on the other. I can drive down the road to the grocery and see that while I have nothing pouring down on me up ahead the grocery is getting soaked.
No one jumps when they hear thunder or see lightning. Instead people count the time between the lightning and the thunder and work a math equation to determine how far off the danger is lurking. That was another thing I had to learn when I moved here because in Indiana we get the hell indoors when we hear or see that type of weather pattern. Floridians are nonchalant despite being the lightning capital of the US. I can now spot a coming storm just by the types of clouds forming overhead.
And when it rains it can last anywhere from ten seconds to half an hour. Rain in Florida doesn't last long unless a hurricane is brewing in the Gulf, and we know to keep an umbrella handy. If we even use one. Most of us know to wait out a downpour because it will be over sooner than later, but it is the aftermath of the rain that brings the problems. Bugs. Those things come scurrying out of their holes after a rain including roaches and mosquitoes. We have an issue this summer with the biting insects and so after a rain we have to go around outside and empty anything that might have accumulated a puddle during the rainfall. Because if we don't those mosquitoes are laying eggs and multiplying faster than the mustard algae. Of course, we are being told these mosquitoes are from some foreign country and carrying a dreaded disease to go along with the Zika mosquitoes we already have in our area. God knows what will happen if these two get together and procreate.
I usually get away from the heat in Florida for a time period in the summer. Every morning I check my SIL's temperatures. She is experiencing morning temperatures in the 60's and 70's and I groan each time I see the number on my weather phone app. Why is it that this summer my holiday destination is to areas where the temperatures are scorching? Why did I not fly to the northern part of the Midwest? Oh, woe, is me.
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