Things That Bug: The Lowest Depth of Misery

There is nothing worse than stepping into a crack in the pavement in the summer and submerging your high heel in liquid tar.  Tar that sticks to the high heel.  Tar that is black, which would be somewhat easier to tolerate if your shoe was black - but, somehow, this always seems to happen when you are wearing shoes that are not-black.

Shoe-swallowing tar is, unfortunately, a fact of life in North Texas these days.  We are well into our third straight week of double-digit temperatures, and it has not rained since the Bush Administration.  (Okay, that last part is a slight exaggeration - but only a slight one.)  It is no doubt a bad sign that the local meteorologists, who previously were known to worriedly count consecutive 100-degree days, are no longer bothering to count.  Also, one of the meteorologists on Channel 5 actually uttered the phrase "highs in the low 100's all week."  I know that "low 100's" is technically not an oxymoron, but it really ought to be an oxymoron.  There's nothing low about the 100's - except, perhaps, for its debilitating effect on morale.

The grass is dying.  I have been forced to move all of the "sun" potted plants into "part shade" and the "part shade" plant into "full shade."  I finally pulled up my tomato plant, because the poor dear didn't stand a chance.  The pepper plants are surviving, but barely.  Ditto my anniversary-present maple tree.

Speaking of wood . . . you know that it's bone-dry and hot outside when the bone-dry heat leaches inside and starts to warp your wood floors.  Seriously:  I can't walk across my living and dining room floors, because the bottoms of my very sensitive feet (I borrowed them from the princess of pea fame) can tell that the individual boards have pulled apart a bit and are curling up ever so slightly at the edges.  It makes me want to cry - which might be a good thing, because at least tears are moisture.  But I would probably get dehydrated.

At least we have pier and beam, I tell myself.  Unlike a slab, our foundation is designed to contract and expand.  Of course, this means that we'll develop cracks in the sheetrock running from the corners of the window and door frames up to the ceiling.  But that's the price of pier and beam - and pier-and-beam sheetrock cracks are of far less import than slab-related sheetrock cracks.

This is what I tell myself . . . as I hoof it across my wood floor and try not to notice that it is undulating.