Greetings from the center of the sun. Or as I like to call it “home”. In a fit of insanity, I chose to live in a fourth floor walk-up that’s the size of a celebrity’s walk in closet. The kicker is NOT the forty steps up to our suite, no, it’s the lack of air conditioning.

So we’ve all become nudists. Mini-Tex has stopped saying “Mommy! Your pants! Find your pants!” when I walk around now. We can all just sit on the couch in a partially-clothed, over-heated heap. The newest toddler game has segued from jumping on the couch to sticking himself to the couch. Given that he was always wearing clothing before, Mini-Tex only just discovered the joy and entertainment of peeling bare skin off vinyl. A trick he repeats over and over in the way two year olds do.

For some strange reason when Mini-Tex goes to bed, my husband and I don’t find the same glee in unsticking our bare skin from the couch.

Fun Fact– Air conditioning changed the timing of babies. Previously people didn’t want to bang-a-lang when their goolies were all sweaty, so fewer babies were born in April and May. But with the advent of central air suddenly people were bumping uglies year round and there were more spring babies. True story.

Tex and I lived this fact the other night. So it was 35 degrees Celsius outside and approximately 7,000 degrees in our apartment. Mini Tex had demanded the fan be moved to the bedroom so my husband and I were left to sweat it out in a sticky, mostly naked mess on the couch. Sounds hot right?

You better believe it was. I mean I was lying there, completely motionless and yet beads of sweat still were forming under my eyes. If that isn’t hot, I don’t know what is. The couch is small, so my legs were draped over Tex. He put a hand on my knee, then moved it to my ankle and uttered the words every woman desires to hear. “Your entire body feels like a dog’s nose- vaguely moist and clammy.”

My God, it was like the trilogy of Fifty Shade of Grey right there in one sentence.

“You know,” I responded “now would be as good a time as any to experiment with ice cubes”.

“Do we have ice?”

I snorted. “This place doesn’t have a pot with handles. Do you think there’s an ice tray?”

“There are frozen peas.”

The prospect removing a package of frozen peas to cool myself was attractive, but liable to be messy given my habit of tearing into the plastic bags like a cougar ripping into a gazelle. It makes for a lot of large and oddly shaped holes, which would make for many tiny, frozen marbles on the floor. I shot down the idea “Nope. The pork chops could defrost on my stomach though.”

In the end, we stole the fan back from a sleeping Mini-Tex and lay on the couch thinking about all the celibate couples like ourselves before the advent of air conditioning.