the happiness project

when we woke up this morning and realized that A) it is still August and B) spending more than two minutes outside could turn you into one large strip of sizzling flesh we decided perhaps it was a good day for a trip to town. There was some tractor shopping that needed to be done (I shit you not) and one of the dogs required a return trip to the vet about a brown recluse bite that will not heal (again, I shit you not) and after a week of listening to me complain about the weather, I think Andrew was down to his last resorts for making me happy in a heat wave: a trip to Target and a meal of good Mexican food.

There are probably people out there who think it’s gross to crave cheese when the temperatures are soaring, but those are the same people who ‘just can’t eat anything’ when they get depressed. I don’t understand those people. Those people probably also never lose one sock in the washer or find themselves at an impasse for hours over whether or not it’s appropriate to become a facebook friend of an old flame. I think life happens to be a bit more enjoyable when it’s messy and the same rule holds true for my food and that’s part of the reason I’m okay with the fact that chicken fried steak is a food group of it’s own in my neighborhood. All that aside, the truth of the matter is that there there are only so many things you can do when it’s 108 degrees outside. Once the tractors have been perused, the dog has been healed and the ultraviolet lights at Target have sent your infant into a tailspin—a big bowl of melted cheese and tortilla chips is pretty much your best bet for sanity. The air conditioning? Yeah, it comes free with your order, and that’s why you bothered getting out of bed this morning and finding a shirt in your closet that would properly camouflage any armpit sweating that might occur in the next twelve hours.

We stretched the meal out as long as we could but eventually our stomachs were about to burst due to the solace we’d ingested and when I stood up to go to the restroom I saw that my ass had semi-permanently molded the material in the chair I was sitting in so obviously it was time to return home. By the time we had loaded up in the truck the internal thermometer had reached 109 and as soon as I witnessed that I began a deep, guttural wail that would have undid all the good my order of queso had done and probably also slightly (or massively) upset the baby so Andrew pulled out his phone to check the weather for the next week. If he could have, he probably would have checked all the way into January so he could have given me enough good news to keep me calm for the hour we had until we got home. But alas, all he had to comfort me with was this, ‘Good news, there’s a major cold front coming through, it’s going to be 91 on Wednesday.’

You heard it here first, time to pull your sweaters out of the closet because the cold front is on the way.