This morning, around 9am, it was already 88 degrees in our enclosed porch. It's even hotter outside. Actually, the porch buffers much of the heat, so inside the house isn't very bad. It's almost pleasant. If it starts to feel hot, I just walk outside for a moment and then come back in, and I have the impression that it's quite cool.

I was going to start tie-dying today, but plans have been temporarily delayed by last night's events. (Luckily, it's so hot--around 95 today--that it will help me out in the long run. I'll get to explaining that in a sec, but first I'll digress.)

Snark and I were very productive yesterday. We began our morning by riding our bikes to the breakfast club around 7am, having breakfast, and then riding back. When we got home, Snark tackled the tedious process of replacing the starter in our car, and I worked in the garden for about four hours. That damn strip where my tank top rises and my shorts lower got sunburned again. (It's a forgettable area of skin when it's just normal colored skin and usually covered by a shirt, and it's been a while since I've been sunburned there, so I hadn't thought about it until I was in the shower and saw that I had a two inch banding of neon red above my hips. OW!)

Snark built a beautiful frame the other day for our squash climbers to sprawl out on. As of yesterday, current garden inventory of the visible fruits of our labor are: green tomatoes, lots of baby-sized peppers, some zucchini, squash balls (not yet distinguishable, but probably pumpkins and hubbard squash), an itsy bitsy watermelon smaller than a fingernail, lots of basil, a beet that I pulled, and a cucumber.

This weekend is pride fest, so there were events, local booths, and general partying downtown including an accordion player, and ice cream truck, and many happy gay couples and families strolling around enjoying the afternoon. After gardening, I rode my bike downtown to help a friend in her jewelry booth. We sold some jewelry, but generally stood around in the sun for four hours while people walked by, admired the jewelry, and then walked away without buying anything. Snark went to work to serve lots of flamboyant gay men and other generally rowdy customers.

I continued with my productivity that evening by packing for my trip to CA, washing clothes for tie-dying, and starting to wash dishes when the electricity went off around 9pm. And it stayed off. (I had to finish the load in the morning and the dishes didn't get washed until half an hour ago.)

The whole town was blacked out. Santiago's still had food to serve to customers (as did the other restaurants in town); bars were full of people who couldn't see and live music that couldn't play. A really bad night for it, all things considered, since it's one of Bisbee's biggest money making nights of the year, cut short. The staff at Santiago's had to sweep and mop and wash dishes by hand in the dark with just a few flashlights on hand.

Apparently what happened was a woman, driving 60 miles per hour and drunk, coming off one of our narrow and hilly side streets onto Tombstone Canyon (the speed limit is only 25 miles per hour at the fastest) went straight, instead of turning, and hit a utility pole head on, breaking it in half, her car rebounding off of it. She did survive the crash. That's the good news. But the lower half of Old Bisbee had a power outage for a few hours and the upper half was blacked out for even longer, meaning that the festivities that bring money to our local businesses, hotels, and town in general couldn't continue, right when it was really getting started.

So today the street is still blocked off and they're working on replacing the pole. My delayed-until-this-morning laundry is out drying on the clothes line, so maybe we will get to tie dye later on in the day. Snark and I rode bikes today to the Bisbee pool; Snark tried to help me relearn how to do the side stroke, breast stroke, scissor kick, and frog kick. It was fun, but ridiculously hard for me to synchronize my breathing, arm strokes, and legs. Now we're back home checking tasks off our to-do lists as we finish them.

I hope to post some photos later on from the last week and half when I didn't post anything.