Surfing the heat wave

Checking the paper this morning, I glanced at the forecast and noticed, to my amazement, that Saturday's forecast is 106º!!! I've never seen a FORECAST that high--usually they're conservative in predicting daily highs. Hopefully they're just exaggerating and not being conservative with this. We only have air conditioning in one room of our house. (It's in the bedroom, but since it's a pretty high capacity air conditioner, if we leave it on all night, we often wake up FREEZING, only to step outside the bedroom and be roasted. Then, after breaking a sweat, go back into the walk-in cooler and get back under the quilt. It's crazy, but hey, it works for us.) Since we probably don't want to spend the weekend trapped in our bedroom with the air conditioner on full-blast, we'll have to think of other ways to cool off--like put our clothes in the freezer now in preparation or just go down to the river with no clothes.

Speaking of which, last year, Margaret and I were driving back to Portland along the Columbia River and there's a state park with a nude beach. Since we didn't have any swimsuits (we weren't planning on swimming when we left on the trip) we thought why not--we wouldn't see anyone we knew and it would give us a chance to cool off. We nervously pulled into the park and passed the clothed beach access and made our way to the other end of the park. The path that lead to the nude area had a large warning sign, cautioning the faint of heart that they might see naked people. Growing up innocent Mormons, we were pretty trepidacious about actually going through with it--public nudity ranking up there among mortal sins just under voting Democrat. We eventually goaded one another into it, despite our misgivings. We started down the beach path, wending our way through the willows. We walked and walked and WALKED, not sure when we'd get to the water. We finally made it to the river and, upon surveying the surroundings, noticed that there were only men around--we'd overshot the family area and stumbled onto the gay beach! Margaret said she didn't know about me, but that she was fine--none of the other beach-goers were giving her a second look. Despite her comfort with it, I proposed that we make our way back along the river to find the family area. In the end we didn't stay long--partly because it was so weird but more because there are parts of us that have NEVER seen sun and without sunblock we weren't willing to take any risks with sunburnt rear ends with a long drive still ahead of us.