Okay, Who Turned Up The Heat?

Right about the time I realized I'd paid for my food, took my cups of water, and drove away without my burritos, it also occurred to me that someone must have thrown a hot coal down my shirt when I wasn't looking.

I thought at first it must have been all the banging on the steering wheel and growling through clenched teeth as I realized there were no burritos to be had seeing as how I'd left them back at the Taco Bell drive-thru. Or maybe the stress of being on hold, transferred to a dead connection, redialing to be put on hold again all while my phone is beeping at me that I have a low battery. Oh yes, and all on a tight deadline.

But it didn't go away even when I took a few deep, cleansing, in-through-the-nose-out-through-the-mouth breaths.

It just kept getting... worse.

Good heavens!!! What's wrong with me?!, I thought as I frantically fanned my face with one hand. I mean, sure I'm still shedding hair like a cat in spring, but I haven't had hormonal hot flashes in a few months, at least!

Okay, this was NOT going to do it. HOT!!! FLASH!!!!

I grabbed the hem of my sweatshirt and reefed it up over my head, flinging my arms out of the sleeves one and a time and reveling in the relief of the short-sleeved t-shirt underneath.

Whew!

Much better. But I still considered rolling all the windows down, too, except for that part about the wind on the baby's face. Poor kid would have been holding her breath so hard she wouldn't even be able to cry. She'd be all telepathically screaming at me to turn off the horrid wind tunnel already.

I was...drenched... with sweat. There's no other way to put it.

And not like that lovely, glistening, dewy kind of sweat that pretty girls do when they've hit the gym for the third time today.

No, no. Mine was more like those unfortunate people in front of an audience with enormous dark circles under their arms and a soaking wet hankie they keep mopping their brow with.

I didn't even dare look around at the other drivers when we reached the stop light. I'm pretty sure they were all stopped several car lengths back with fingers poised to call the state patrol after watching me with my arms flailing wildly in my big ole' suburban.

Instead I rolled down the window closest to me and hung my bare arm over the side. Whew! The warm air and sunshine felt so good! That whole February thaw was so incredibly WONDERFUL! And RARE! We usually don't see 40 degrees through both January AND February and we're lucky to have an early March thaw like this, let alone the week of Valentine's!

Ahh, feel the breeze! Ahhh! OH! Ooops, time to go, green light!

I reluctantly rolled up the window as I turned.

And finally it occurred to me that the background noise, the sound that got absolutely NO attention whatsoever from me because it was an ever-present white-noise kind of sound, one that I'd gotten used to the absolute constancy of for the past 8 weeks thanks to the frigid temperatures...


... was the heater fan going full blast.