Three Beautiful Things 08/29/18:The Cooler Inland Northwest, Easy Afternoon, Radio Dinner and Early to Bed

1. I propelled myself out of bed around 7 a.m. and sashayed down to the Ramada Inn's breakfast buffet for coffee, croissant, scrambled eggs, hash browns, a sausage patty, and some gravy. After writing a blog post, I returned to the room to see how the Deke was doing and she was just about ready to leave.

We stepped outside the Ramada Inn and nearly cried. When we left Nyack and Valley Cottage, NY, the temperature was about 92 degrees, but my Weather Underground app said it felt like 104. It had been sweltering, soupy, steamy, thick, sticky, sultry, muggy, suffocating, and stifling in New York. Here in the Ramada Inn parking lot, the temperature was around 60 degrees, a breeze was kicking up, and we felt light, released, refreshed, and invigorated.

Later in the day, I read the New York Times coverage of how the oppressive heat in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York was affecting the tennis players in the U. S. Open currently underway.  The U.S. Open is played on hard courts. These courts absorb the heat. It can feel like 120 degrees on days like NY has had recently. The players are being given heat breaks. They change clothes. They cool off in air conditioned rooms -- if they are near one. They hydrate. Some ice themselves. It's brutal.

I don't see how they do it. I had to stop and rest regularly on Tuesday as I crawled the streets of Midtown Manhattan -- I was panting, sweating, and feeling the world around me begin to close in as the heat dominated my consciousness. Luckily, we ducked into air conditioned buildings, rode air conditioned Suburbans driven by Uber drivers, and took our time getting from one place to another. It was brutal.

2. Once home, we took it easy all day long. I napped. The most ambitious things I did were pick up our held mail and shop for some groceries at Yoke's. In the afternoon, I retired to the tv room and watched the first part of an episode of Wallander and got pretty caught up in wondering if the wily and determined Kurt Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) was going to figure out a missing woman case while attending a conference in South Africa.

3. I had big plans, now that the kitchen is cooler, to braise a rump roast for dinner, but the Deke said she wanted to eat dinner out. No problem. We tried to go to the Hill St. Depot, but couldn't get to it because of construction, so we went to Radio Brewing where I enjoyed a crab cobb salad with a glass of white wine.

We returned home just in time for me to tune in to one of my free MLB.TV baseball games and I watched the Pirates and Cardinals go at it for just about five innings, but I was suddenly overcome by sleepiness and, with the Pirates ahead 2-0 (a score that held), I went to bed.