What sort of man willingly leaves 65 and breezy and dives into three days of 100-and-fuck? A devoted father, that's who. Enduring a heat wave like this would be hard enough without knowing that, so very recently, I was a tourist yokel shivering in short pants.
Now that the light bulb in God's EZ-Bake Oven has finally dimmed, we are emerging from our slack-jawed torpors and considering all sorts of wacky, life-affirming activities. Like venturing outdoors, and speaking in complete sentences.
'Twas not always thus. The in-laws have a couple of ACs in strategic places, so the six of us often found ourselves in the same room, staring at the same grimaced faces, grunting at the overfamiliarity and resisting the urge to squeeze ourselves into the fridge. Tempers have flared, garments rent, teeth gnashed. Not our finest hour. (Relived in a constant loop, 72 times.)
There have been two saving graces; the first is our new rental car, a total Grey Poupon wannabe. It is one bad-ass vee-hicle, and we have dubbed it the Bontley, because it desperately wants to be either a Bentley or a Bond car. Black leather seats, fake burled walnut, all that crap. It is also bulletproof and shoots Stinger missiles from its headlights.
The second is the local children's science museum, which is totally cool. (And by "cool" I mean Super-Nerdy-Goobertastic.) It has a perpetual motion machine, giant Tangrams, water tables, an optical illusion center, and on and on. It also has a station that lets you perform a fake weathercast in front of a green screen. Robert got up there and, as sure as I'm sitting here, he started waving his arms around and said, "This area will be icky, and this area is all farts." I was laughing so hard some guy offered me his inhaler.
In keeping with this theme, we also found a Human Noise Piano that plays sniffles and burps and farts instead of notes. I think we were there for about 45 minutes, annoying the hell out of the staff at the cafe next door. But oh, how we needed it.
We had been cooped up, roasting, making our own gravy, and snapping at each other like cornered coyotes. And nothing takes the edge off the dog days, I've learned, like using a keyboard to belch Chopsticks.
