HOT!!!!

The heat has returned.

Yesterday at 4:30 it was 99 degrees (37.2 degrees celsius).

Last night at 9:00 p.m. it was 88 degrees (31.1 degrees celsius).  In our house!  Two nights ago Benay had to get up in the middle of the night to take a cold shower just so she could go to sleep.

This morning at 5:00 it was 82 outside with a heat index of 91 and it had "cooled off" to 87 in our house.  That's at the coolest part of the day.

A Brasilian national news channel said yesterday was the highest usage of electricity in the country.....EVER.

It is stinking hot or as Anderson would say, "smoking hot."  I may have shared before but if you put smoking in front of any word it makes it more powerful....at least in Anderson's world.

We haven't had any wind, or any rain (longer than 5 minutes that just make it more humid) or any way to cool off our entire house.  The sun is brutal. We don't have central air and it's too expensive to run our window air units for very long.

We are, as you can imagine, always looking for ways to cool off.

Most days we take two showers.  One when we get up and one right before bed.  We only use cold water.  I've never been in a habit of just taking cold water showers before but it's that hot.  Even after the cold shower at night you still sweat in your bed.

The other day we took the kids to the mall to enjoy the air conditioning.  While we were there Carys and Anderson got to be mini movie stars.  Benay blogged a little bit about that on her blog.  If you haven't read it you can go to her blog here .  The heat seems to be a common blog theme for us right now. If you take that link to her blog then you just need to scroll down to her post on February 1st.

Yesterday we went to the pool.  It was a holiday.  We didn't go until around 5:00 p.m. because we thought most of the crowd would be gone by then.  We were wrong. We obviously weren't the only ones who had that idea. The heat and day off from work brought a bunch of people out.

You can see Benay and the kids in the front of this picture. 

Today it's supposed to cool off and only get up to 95 degrees (35 degrees celsius).  Actually the forecast calls for highs between 95-98 every day until Sunday.

I spoke with one of our neighbors this morning and she said the heat is coming from Argentina.  It's already killed some elderly people there. She told me the heat index in our city yesterday was almost 115 degrees (46 degrees celsius).

It'a so hot that last night we even had to break one of our rules.  We actually slept with the air on all night.  We just couldn't stand the heat. I think our first summer here was the last time we ran a window unit all night.

Not all the rooms in our house have window units.  Our bedroom and Carys and Giovanni's room don't have them. Garrett and Anderson's room and Bronwyn and Ansley's room both have them.

So with the two teenage girls gone we shifted some folks around.  Benay, Giovanni and I slept in Bronwyn and Ansley's room.  Garrett, Carys and Anderson slept in the boys room.

We have a control knob on the little units.  Once the room gets to a certain temperature it automatically shifts from cold air to fan until it gets hot again and then the air comes back on.  The units never switched during the entire night.  They only blew out cold air.  I thought there might be a problem until I realized that the little units never were able to cool off the rooms below 80 degrees so they never shifted to fan mode.

Even the dogs are trying not to move to conserve energy.  This is what they do most of the day.

I've always heard about the "dog days of summer" and now I guess I understand.

We've been here before and know that we can survive this heat but we would appreciate prayers for a little relief.

Okay, I'm done whining.

Okay no I'm not.  As I was finishing this post Benay was looking at the Weather Channel on the internet and told me it's 15 degrees cooler right now where Bronwyn and Ansley are.  Our heat here is also supposed to end about the time they get back home. Not fair.

Okay, now I'm done whining.