We made it pretty easily through night one with no air conditioning. The house was a little stuffy because it was pretty hot and sunny all day on Friday, but Saturday morning was cooler and more overcast, so things were actually feeling pretty comfortable.
Erin took Asta for a walk and the kids got back to playing dress-up. When Erin got back, she went out to water the plants and the kids wanted to help. Amelia looked quite dainty doing it.
Being Saturday, it was also shopping day, so I got my list and my act together and headed over Boulder for supplies. That all went pretty smoothly. I did get into an odd conversation with an extremely chatty checkout guy at one of the stores I visited. I was buying some kids allergy medicine and he remarked how funny it was that this particular product was deemed worthy of an anti-shoplifting tag. I suppose there might be some folks out there whose idea of fun is getting high on over the counter kids allergy meds, but I agreed that was a little odd. “I wonder who made that call,” I said.
The checkout guy then told me that there is a corporate algorithm that decides which products get those tags. Kind of like a futuristic AI retail Skynet, I guess. He then told me that the store got into some trouble a few months ago when some makeup products were getting tagged…more specifically, makeup for darker complexions. So anyone who wants to tell me that there aren’t issues of systemic prejudice inherent in our society, I’d beg to differ. Jeez. It’s literally programmed in.
Anyway, I got home and got everything put away just before we got smacked with an extremely intense thunderstorm. It maybe lasted 10 minutes, but what a ten minutes it was. The wind was about as insane as I’d ever seen, and we were treated to some swirling hail as well. Thankfully it came and went quickly, but it understandably freaked the kids out a little. But just a few minutes after the storm moved on its way, the kids were outside playing in the hail. Whee!
See, even hail can be fun. I particularly liked that they felt it necessary to wear mittens when it was like 80 degrees outside.
Later, I fired up the grill and made some burgers for the kids and bourbon marinated salmon for Erin and me.
I will now plug the “Shut In Chef” section of my new website and say, check out the recipe here!
That was about it for Saturday. Thankfully, the storm brought some nice cool air into the area so we were able to open the windows and be very comfortable during night two of our AC pause. The fresh air was pretty great, actually. More of that is always a good thing, and that will be be the theme for tomorrow.
