Day 104 - Sun Hits Sky

K___'s been finding it hard to work in this current heat.

She works in a university and is timetabled to work in certain places at certain times, normally for a period of several hours. One of the places she gets time-tabled to work is under a glass roof. In fact, it's what used to be the quadrangle. A roof has been put in and now it's just a part of the building in which she works. You'll not be surprised to hear that this roof acts like something of a greenhouse in high summer.

If you're reading this in the UK, it won't have escaped your notice that July 2006 is on target to be the hottest in the UK since 1911. In fact, as I write this, it is possible that today's highest temperatures may exceed 36C (96.8F). Admittedly this is likely to be in West London, not east where either K___ or I work, but it is nevertheless going to be quite ridiculously hot. As I walked out of the cool of my office last night, the wall of heat scorched my lungs and made my eyes shrivel like raisins.

I am aware, as I write this that quite a few of the splendid people who read this blog are in the USA and, judging from my stats, some of those come from California. I appreciate that temperatures of 36C are the norm at midnight where you live, but in the UK we have a thing called 'rain' as our default weather and 36C is bloody hot to us. Even at 08.20, as I was en route to work, it was 22.3C (72F) outside. That's a reasonably pleasant temperature for midday, fer gawd's sake.

I suppose we're quite lucky that when K___ is very heavily pregnant it's likely to be quite a lot cooler. Several mothers have commented to us that it's pretty hellish to be carrying all that extra weight, plus all the tiredness etc that comes with the third trimester in the depths of summer.

Of course, I expect that cold weather has its own challenges.