Addison has been pleading to go to the playground all week long. I finally caved today, and took her after my workout. I hadn't checked the forecast when we left this morning, so I could only make some assumptions about the temperature based on what we experienced. I knew it would be hot, because this is California, and it's almost always way too hot here, no matter what those tricksters say about the temperature in California being so nice. When I put Addison in her carseat after the gym, she said:
"Hot! Burning me! Too hot!"And I said to her:
"You better get used to this, kid, because we live here now, and we're going to be here for a long, long time."And then I laughed maniacally. But she said she still wanted to go to the playground, despite me promising her some soy milk if we just went straight home and skipped the outside stuff. I told her:
"If we go to the playground, the sun will burn us. We might catch on fire. We might be consumed in a brief burst of pain and glory, and travel in black clouds of ash up to meet our maker. Is that what you want?"And she said:
"Yes."So we went to the playground, and sat in the shade of one of the slides and poked out what Addison calls "nests" in the wood chips. We collected a few acorns to put in the nests to stand proxy for eggs. And then I made another appeal to my daughter.
"Do you want Daddy to die? Right here? Because it's so hot I think I might die. Or at least melt. You'll have to bring me home in a cup, and when mom asks you where daddy is, you'll have to show her the cup and explain that it was all because you wanted to go to the playground."And she was like,
"Daddy ina cup? Wha?"And I was like,
"That's right. And in order to get me back, you'll have to put the cup in the freezer, to turn me back into a solid. But since it's so tricky to get a melty dad into a cup in the first place, a lot of me will have just soaked into the ground. So when you finally pull me out of the freezer, it'll just be, like, my elbow or something. You'll have nothing left of daddy but an elbow."And she was like,
"Daddy, you silly."But she finally agreed to go home, because she said that the sun was "burning all the babies." Maybe that's what I should have led with. That by staying outside, we were allowing the sun to burn all of the babies.
When we got home, I told my wife I was going to die, and she told me to stop being so dramatic. But then she told me to look at weather.com, and this is what I saw:
It was even hotter while we were at the playground earlier. This is just what it read at 4:00. And you'll note that weather.com gives an explanation of what 102 degrees means. "Very hot," it offers, in a bit of cruel understatement. Try this, weather.com:
When you leave the shelter of your house or your car, you will be entering a furnace. Everything around you is being cooked, slowly and painfully. If you stay in the direct sunlight for more than seven seconds, your skin will begin to blister and then char, and if there is a breeze it will blow away in dark whirlwinds of dust and death. If you squint into the distance, you may see ghostly filaments shimmering above the horizon. These are flaming devils frolicking over ruined corpses. A few more degrees, and the earth begins a transformation, expanding and bloating on the rapid increase of heat. A few more degrees, and you will be standing on a sun, a flaming sphere of plasma in a state of constant nuclear explosion, which burns babies.I do appreciate, however, that weather.com offers an "ugh!" reaction to the weather. As far as I know, "ugh!" does not effect any change on the temperature, but I keep clicking it just in case. Maybe God somehow receives all of those "ugh!" reactions, and by clicking it, it's like I'm adding to a signature petition for a little divine intervention. But if there's some jerk clicking "love!" somewhere, I'm going to be seriously ticked.