Desperate Women Call for Chemical Solutions

Good Morning -

You know it's going to be a special kind of evening when the first thing you and your partner do when you get home from work is to strip down and lay on the bed, trying not to touch because it's too hot and humid and you know if you do, you'll stick, not be able to get apart, and spontaneously combust.

You know that in this weather, naked isn't hot or sexy and doesn't feel good because you stick to yourself, no matter what shape you're in, but that there's nothing you can wear when it's hot and humid that will feel good and at least if you're naked, there's less laundry to do because everything you wear in this weather gets drenched in sweat.

You know it's going to be one for the books (or the blog, in this case) when you get up from this attempted siesta to baby wipe your breasts and feet because they have been sweaty all day in your bra and sandals and started to mold sometime after noon and the smell was lingering in your nose as you tried to cool down and dry off on the bed. You had considered, for a moment, taking a shower, but knew you wouldn't dry off until November, and that felt like a really long time to be sticky.

You know the heat and humidity have sent you over the edge when you come back to your bed in the dining room to find your partner no longer naked, but wearing the hiking shoes she got that day in the mail. She asks how they look, you say "good", move the packing materials for the shoes from a pile on the bed to a pile on the floor, and both resume laying in your sweat, praying for something to make it end.

What ended it for us yesterday evening was the plague of mosquitoes that came to feast on our damp naked flesh as we tried to dry off and cool down on our dining room bed. We've had mosquitoes in the house this whole summer, but this seemed to be a particularly high number. After a few minutes of getting bitten in bed, we decided we needed to get up and try to check the swamp cooler to see if there was standing mosquito water in it. We hadn't run it in weeks, but felt that they might be coming in through the vents.

As it so happened, someone (our landlord? his handyman? someone else entirely? - all three are valid choices - our landlord loves to come by without notice, unless we actually call him to come over, then he's nowhere to be found - he's like the wind, our landlord) had propped the ladder that is normally laying against the fence up against the porch and - apparently - been on the roof to check things out. What things we don't know.

I was too hot and grumpy to trust myself on the roof and my partner was willing to go up there, so she scrambled on up the vintage 1940's wooden ladder while I spotted her and held it in place.

Once up there, she pulled off one of the screens and said that the cooler was full of nasty water that needed to be drained. There was a drain hole, but the water was below the top of the pipe sticking out of it, so it was no help.

As ground support, I suggested I get the garden hose and she could siphon it off. This sounded simple enough until - 4 different tools later - I still had not been able to get the hose off of the outdoor faucet where it has - clearly - been attached for a long, long time.

Cursing and getting eaten by all manner of bug, I was getting ready to just cut the hose off the faucet when my partner found a drain hose in the swamp cooler. (Understandably) Not wanting to start the siphon herself, she tried multiple angles to get the water to move through the hose until I eventually voiced the unfortunate, "You're going to have to get that started."

Creating a shield with her hand, she bravely sucked on the nasty hose and got a great siphon going. We were celebrating her success between slapping at mosquitoes when she said that it was filling back up, like when you flush a toilet. After trying to unplug different cords and unsuccessfully looking for the knob to turn the water off, she asked for a fist-sized rock to hold the lever up.

I found one that fit the description and, praying that I neither broke a window or hit my partner square in the head (I can only ever hit the bulls eye when I'm not trying to hit it), I tossed it up onto the roof. It worked okay, but she requested a brick for a more sustainable fix. Knowing that I wasn't going to have the same luck heaving a brick onto the roof from ground level, I walked it up the ladder to her.

We couldn't get all of the water out, so decided to go to Ace and get some of those floaty chemical rings that you can put in water to keep the mosquitoes from breeding in our swamp. Normally I'm not for the chemical solution but desperate women call for desperate solutions.

One more trip up the ladder for my partner and we were able to settle into an evening of nachos, beer, and Disc Two of Ken Burns' The West, comfortable in the false sense of security created by the chemicals now floating in the water left in the swamp cooler.

I've discussed before how knowledge eases my brain, so I spent some time this morning looking at different sites trying to understand how a mosquito came to live in the desert. The site I found explained that one of the types of mosquito we have here (so, yes, somehow there is more than one type of mosquito that calls the desert home) specializes in biting humans, transferring dengue fever, and laying eggs that can dry out, sit dormant for months and then hatch when the rains come (a trick it apparently learned in the rock pools of desert Africa).

So that's our Virgen - a mountain lake scene from a Travel Alaska brochure (because it doesn't look hot nor humid nor mosquito-filled), a label from our beer, and an image of a mosquito male (the non-biters) and the larva.

I don't know about this. I try to welcome and live peaceably with all creatures. I try to listen to mosquito's message about using water to transform, drawing energy inside myself, and controlling energy flow in one direction, but it's hard when my legs are on fire from all the bites.

I don't know. The thought that keeps coming through my head is, "It's time to go." And so it is. Both in the long-term sense and in the this morning sense because Boris needs his meds and I've got some pre-work errands to get done.

Here's to that. Here's to time, listening to messages, listening to oneself, and knowing when it's time to go.