Heat Exchange: Word of the Week

I always smirk when someone leaves the miserable weather in the UK to go on holiday in some warmer climes. Well, this time, you can smirk, in fact, laugh, at me. Here in Florida this week was very hot, but so was the UK. We have been able to keep up with family and friends there while we are away on holiday so we know about the scorcher of a week people are getting away with in the UK.

We even got some updates about the garden back home and how well our tomatoes and even pumpkins are doing. Thankfully Birmingham has had at least 2 days of rain to water the plants for us. We are grateful.

We even planted some seeds from a purple variety of tomatoes that were bought at Costco earlier in the year and in just one week since we’ve been away they seem to have sprung up. We are beyond pleased.

Now we don’t even know if we will get any since we will still be in Florida for some time yet. The neighbours will be happy as we’ve told big daughter to harvest the ripe ones and share with the neighbours.

We are so pleased for the folk in the UK. It really is nice to have several consecutive days of lovely Vitamin D on the skin. The whole mood is revived when the sun comes out.

Here in Florida, it has truly been too hot to even be outside for too long. We left early one morning for the beach and ended up indoors at a shopping mall. Thank God for stores like Target and Marshall’s. If it weren’t for the air conditioning in these places, my holiday would be spent at home. How sad! lol. We enjoyed a lovely bagel breakfast at Austin Brothers and I went for the divine Santa Fe. The bagels were soft and lovely and I enjoyed the pile of egg, turkey sausage, lettuce, and tomato slipping out after each bite.

One day we went bowling and it was so hard to step outside of the air-conditioned car to take the few steps into the building, The heat that hits is really shocking. I know it seems more overbearing to us because we have become acclimatized to being mostly cold in the UK. I sometimes find it hard to believe that people live here, lol.

We’ve been drinking a lot of liquids and finding ways to avoid the heat. When we want to go to the mall or supermarket, we do it first thing in the morning so that we get back indoors before midday. One day on the way back from the mall which is only about 10 minutes walk from the house, we had to stop under some shady trees to rest a little before taking on the last 5 minutes.

We so badly wanted to see some of the Olympic games but the coverage here is so sparse and biased! They only show the US athletes in performance so it’s not half as interesting as it could be. We’ll have to wait till we get back home to see the real highlights. We are cheering on the Jamaican athletes who are getting a welcome reprieve from the heat there to the hot, but still bearable weather at the games in France.

Oh, this week too, the heat got to our heads and we had a good laugh while live on Youtube. We spent just over an hour trying on my mom’s various wigs and letting people tell me what they thought about them. It was a good laugh.

Here’s the video if you want to laugh too.

Cheers to a fantastic week ahead guys. Cool down as much as you can, keep hydrated and enjoy the weather wherever you are.