I’m thinking the back of the heat wave has finally broken. I woke up this morning and didn’t immediately want to hide in my office, I’ve had more energy, cranked out a K on Crystal Blade, and the temps only made it up to 98°F. Tomorrow’s temp is supposed to be pretty much the same, then it starts dropping back into the low nineties.

Of course, the worrying thing is that it’s only June and we’ve already had a multiple day run of triple digit temps, something that’s far more common for July and August. And I know this heat has been straining Anita Gigawatt to a dangerous point; Cthulhu only knows what’s going to happen if we get another heat wave like this in those months.

Anyway, I don’t have the Crystal Blade scene ready for Vella just yet (this is a spicy one) but I should have it ready before the end of the day so stay tuned.

The heat wave was supposed to crest tomorrow but I think we got it today. It was 106°F with a heat index of 119°F. I waited until 8:00 PM to go out and get some Whataburger for dinner so that I didn’t have to heat up the kitchen at all and even then it was still 100°F and the car clearly wasn’t happy about running in those temps.

The biggest problem for me is that even though I’m staying inside I still feel drained. I’m getting the worst sinus headaches and I keep having to go lie down before I get nauseated. I don’t know if it’s because the house is pretty much sealed and we’re not getting a lot of fresh air, or there’s just a lot of mold/pollen/cat dander/what have you that’s been supercharged by the heat, or what the hell is going on. But Nicola is wrecked. I managed to get about 800 words done on Episode 33 of Crystal Blade and got that uploaded, and after that I gave up and went to bed.

Does it suck that this crappy weather hits right while I’m trying to finish the book? You betcha. But I’m also in my late fifties and I have to accept that I have some limitations these days, and trying to work through a screaming sinus headache is simply not on. Hopefully once the heat wave breaks I’ll feel better and can get back to work on cranking out the rest of the Blade eps.

I did our big stock-up yesterday with a goal towards parking the Mazda in the garage and not taking it out again until things start cooling off. I have an intermittent fault somewhere in the driver’s door which triggers the door open warning light and makes it next to impossible to lock the door from the inside.I can lock it from the outside, but it requires a lot of fiddling to get the door open light to go off (and I don’t want to leave that on because it’s a drain on the battery).

As far as I can tell the root cause is a short somewhere in the door, which wouldn’t surprise me—that door faces the setting sun and has been baked every summer since 2014. Fixing it will require pulling off the door seal and checking the wires.  Needless to say I cannot do that without dying of hyperthermia at the moment, so the next best thing to do is keep the car out of direct sunlight, drive it as little as possible, and hope that temps cool down to a point next weekend where I can pull it into the garage, take off the door sill and track down the short. Assuming I can find the relevant bit of melted wire, fixing it will be a matter of wrapping some electrician’s tape around the gap in the wire (or possibly some heat-shrink wire wrap, which I have upsatirs).

It will be hot, sweaty, and unpleasant, but better that than paying a garage a grand for labor and diagnostics.

As you may know, Bob, Coca-Cola has been releasing limited edition flavors from their Creations division. There was Starlight (some kind of berry flavor), Dreamtime (mango), Move (coconut), and now we have Ultimate, which was apparently created in partnership with a gaming company.
I like trying out new flavors (I still miss California Raspberry) and they always bring them out in a Zero version as well so yesterday I tried a small bottle of Ultimate. First opinion: it tastes like bubble gum. After some more analysis I decided it tasted specifically like a cross between Juicy Fruit and banana Laffy Taffy; serious tropical flavor with a strong banana note.

Unfortunately, it’s also sweet as hell and was a bit too much for me. So I stuck the bottle in the fridge and didn’t think anything more about it until I was getting a glass of Coke Zero last night. I figured, eh, waste not want not, and poured the remainder of the Ultimate into my plain Coke Zero (I’m gonna say it was a 50/50 mix).

A revelation—Ultimate’s sweetness was muted by the plain Coke Zero and the really strong banana-y tropical flavor became a pleasant note instead of in-your-face overwhelming. So I picked up a case of the mini-cans today and I’ll be combining them with Coke Zero for the next week or so as an extremely refreshing summertime drink.

Because I follow the divine Suzy Eddie Izzard on the Book of Face I was able to get the fan club promo code for her upcoming North American tour, which will be a remix of the best of her previous shows.

Years ago when we had a lot more money I got front row seats as a birthday present for Ramón and we had an absolutely divine time (I was also amused to realize that the window on the set that showed a slowly changing view acted as a clock so that she could time the set and know whether she needed to stretch or speed it up). Needless to say we don’t have front row seats this time (they weren’t even available by the time I got on to look) but we do have decent seats and will very much be looking forward to this in November.