Epic Heat.

Well, managed to bungle a ridiculously simple web design test, misreading one of the first lines of code and consequently sketching the resulting screen shot totally differently from the actual answer.

Duh.

In addition, I missed a scheduled lunch date because I couldn’t make the in-class Javascript exercise work even if my very life depended upon it, and by the time I finally gave up and called my friend, he had gone without me.

And the final straw, after a long and hot walk (it’s supposed to top out at over 95 degrees today) to the car, I realized that I’d left my driving glasses in the classroom. So back I went. By the time I returned to my car not even full-blast air conditioning could cool an interior temp that must have easily exceeded 120 degrees.

To console myself I decided to go to downtown Amherst and treat myself to a nice big lunch in lieu of supper tonight — since only someone even dumber than me would consider doing any more in this extreme heat by way of meal preparation than, say, pouring a nice cold Sam Adams into a frosted mug. I even had the presence of mind to seek out the controversial downtown garage for parking rather than consigning my laptop to a slow heat-induced death in the car while I dined.

It was the one thing I managed to do right today. The garage took a while to find — the town fathers who planned it made sure you had to hunt for it — but it was curiously empty for so hot a day, and clean and well-lit and civilized, just like Amherst in its aging-hippie way. The surface parking is laid out with trees and plantings, the entrance to the below-ground portion is a ramp that is easy to find despite the lack of an obvious above-ground gate, and there is even public art — currently, a “poetry window“ — in every glassed-in exit kiosk. Once inside the cool dark I found a space right away, and since said garage is in the center of a downtown block, once I emerged I was surrounded by dining choices, should I have needed them, without having to cross a single street.

The sturm und drang about the garage, as I recall, had dragged out for years before the damned thing was actually built. Whether it was needed, where to build it, how large to make it, how much to charge for parking and how to facilitate that, yada yada yada. It went on and on in typical agonizing small-town fashion, and (because this is a college town we’re talking about) a thick overlay of political correctness was slathered onto every decision. There were even some who questioned whether putting a garage so close to the center of the retail district would impact the residents negatively by keeping them from experiencing the healthful benefits of a good stroll.

I kid you not.

Anyway, I’m all for a good stroll, but not in tropical weather. And I was profoundly grateful that in absence of some nice ecologically-sound tree-shaded above ground parking space close by I could keep my car from becoming a blast furnace by stowing it in a massive concrete heat sink for a mere forty cents an hour.

I’m going to take a very cold shower and go to bed after opening the windows as wide as they can go, while praying that we don’t get a sudden thunderstorm in the night. I sure hope the weekend cools off. The poor cats look like limp dishrags. And people go to Florida on purpose for this?