it's THAT time of year here in the stinkin' desert

aaahhh yes....summer in the stinkin' desert. It has arrived. With a vengeance. It's supposed to be 106 out today. And its only going to get worse. Summer is here, yes indeedy. Why just this morning as I was putting the sun tea out to brew, I could hear, see, and smell all the tell tale signs. Lawn mowers where buzzing around the neighborhood, the smell of freshly cut grass was in the air along with meat being cooked on a grill. I dunno, maybe it was the smell of someone sunbathing...same thing. The sidewalk was uncomfortably hot on my bare feet. Not enough to make me dance around like a complete idiot, but hot just the same. I hate the summer. Always have, even as a kid. Oh sure, I liked the idea that school was out and all that goes with long, lazy days of nothing to do but play outside until it was dark. But that's about it. I hate the heat. I hate the mere thought of sweating. My fingers swell up in the summer the size of Lil' Smokies. No, really, they do. If I'm outside for even 5 minutes, I get finger bloat something fierce. Dang uncomfortable too.

We're in our "cave" mode around here. We have a million windows and not only do they all have a protective sun coating on them, we have shutters, and shades and basically we keep them all closed in the summer months to try and keep the house cool and the power bills under $500 a month. I remember when we first moved in to our house I would wake up in the morning and it would be so cold in the house you could hang meat! The kids would walk around with blue lips and frostbitten fingers and toes. I would take them out into the backyard to "thaw" and complain to Scott that something had to be seriously wrong with our air conditioning system because we had the thermostat set at 76 and it had to be 60 or less in the house.
One morning I awoke to the sound of itty bitty children's teeth chattering and went to check the thermostat one more time....and lo and behold and eureka, I figured out what was going on. The sun was shining in one of the big windows we have waaay up high in the living room right smack dab on the thermostat. It was like a freakin' BEACON!!! So, not being able to move the thermostat to a better place we did the next best thing. We put up a roller shade on the window and now that sucker is pulled down as soon as spring is here. We're on top of that crap let me tell you.

So...here I sit on a Sunday afternoon. I've done two loads of laundry (yea me) and I've done the only other thing you can do when you're stuck in the house cuz you're too big of a baby to meet the summer head on and embrace it in all it's miserbale hotness.....I made lemon cupcakes. Can I deal, or what?