A hot Sunday

Now it feels cool at 92ºF, but today was a hot one. I rode my bicycle with my friend Ronnie, from my neighborhood in North Central Tucson, to the university area. On the way back we cycled through the U of A campus and stepped into a cool fountain up to our thighs. In Monterey I missed the intense heat and the cleansing action that occurs in the body from drinking lots of water and sweating. The wierd thing, though, is that I am often freezing here in the summer because many public buildings, cafés, markets, and especially supermarkets blast their AC. I cannot shop in a supermarket in the summer without a sweater, yet it would be crazy to wear a sweater outside in the heat.

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I've been reading a blog posted on the Christian Science Monitor online. It's written by a second grade girl who is accompanying her mother to Senegal. Like Tucson, Senegal is very hot. The people they are staying with stay up until midnight and get up early in the morning. Sounds like my life here. I cannot go to sleep early in the summer heat, so I am up most nights until midnight.

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At night, I've been allowing Jesse to go in and out of the dog door, into the backyard, and over the fence. I hope she won't become a coyote's snack.

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For two days there was a little baby mourning dove who stayed behind the big potted plants in the front gated alcove of the house. I think one of its' wings was sore. The dove is gone now; I assume it flew away.

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In the NY Times today I read about a 17-yr old boy from Bihar state, India, who loves math and wants to study astronomy and work at NASA some day. He has been studying very hard to get into one of India's prestigous and competitive ITT schools. The first time he failed the six-hour chemistry, math, and physics test, but the second time he made it. The article says that getting into and graduating from that type of school will profoundly change his family's life (economically, and probably in other ways, too). As an Indian with a higher education, he'll be able to afford getting water into his family's household, to put a real roof on their house, and to have his father quit his job as a rickshaw driver. All this and a chance to do research in the area of his interest.