It’s been plenty hot this year. Lately it’s been getting into the high 80s and low 90s every afternoon for weeks now. Being at about 5000 feet, it does cool down at night, into the high 50s or so, but our lows have been gradually rising. The net result is that our one-level brick house has been getting a bit warmer, day by day. I’m sitting at my computer now just after 8 in the morning, and it’s already rather warm here at my desk. Our big window fan is sucking in the fresh morning air from the yard, cooling things down a bit, at least with the nice air flow. We don’t need air conditioning.

I wouldn’t say this is any hotter than other years… memories are pretty subjective. We stay cool enough, most of the time. Our house is uphill enough from the town that we get whatever breezes come off Lake Chapala, about a kilometer away. We swim every afternoon now. Kelly has taken up wearing shorts regularly for the first time in his life! Who says people can’t change?

Once the rains begin, it cools down enough that we will start sleeping under blankets again, and we’ll get to stop watering the yards and garden so much. The highs will often be the high 70s and low to mid 80s, which I consider perfect.

Watering has been a challenge at times, because the city water was off for a couple of days. Getting enough water can be tricky at the end of the dry season, but part of the situation this year is that some new water mains are going in, a good thing in a town where the water system is sometimes called leaky. We take shorter showers and all that, but we did acquire a quarter-acre yard with lots of plantings. Everything is getting the minimum for now.

This is our first year with our vegetable gardens. We’ve had trouble starting seeds in the beds because of the midday heat, so we started seeds in yogurt containers and transplanted them. We’ve had great lettuce, just now trying to bolt. We’ve been eating lots of squash. We just pulled our broccoli plants yesterday, as we were getting more aphids than flowerets — these plants were great producers when it was cooler. Our tomatoes are still green but getting quite large. Our lemon tree keeps us in lemons, and we have some bananas coming along.

Now, about the scorpions…

They come out of the ground when it gets warm, and for whatever reasons, they love to come indoors. We spray, with some pet-friendly stuff, and that helps. But in recent weeks there has been at least one scorpion a week in the house. One week there were four, and I muttered about moving to Alaska.

This morning, we had just finished making the bed when Kelly said “Get the dogs away,” with an urgency in his voice. I figured it was a scorpion just from his tone of voice, before he even said the word.  I called the dogs and got them outside. Kelly scooped the huge scorpion into our dishpan and flushed it.

This time was a little different, though — Kelly had been wearing just socks and he had felt a very slight sting. His foot showed nothing, though. He put our ice pack on the floor and rested his foot on it while he had his morning tea.

So he was lucky. I killed another one on the front porch just now.

And so it goes in our tropical paradise!