Sticky

Corie asks for cool thoughts to be sent her way: it has been in the 80s all week and so humid that every surface of our (un-air-conditioned) school is literally sticky. A fruit leather partially melted in my desk today! The children sit still and sweat beads on their foreheads. Their uniforms don't help; it has reached the point where we teachers have asked principal to alter the dress code to allow students to wear capri pants or shorts of appropriate length (I think she is the ONLY person in the building with any doubt that this is a necessary and humane change to our policy).

I showed "Tigers in the Snow" today, a National Geographic documentary about Siberian tigers. It's pretty cool - it shows biologists sedating and tagging the tigers, observing the behavior of both wild and captive tigers, and rescuing cubs born in captivity and neglected by the mother. I had to explain to the kids that sometimes a mother animal assesses the situation and decides that her offspring are unlikely to survive, and so she chooses not to invest any energy in raising them (at times mothers will even eat the offspring). This is fairly common among animals raised in captivity. They had a hard time with this idea. Anyway, seeing tigers cavorting in the snow in Siberia took my mind off the heat, at least for a few minutes. We'll finish the movie tomorrow.

My personal hot-weather strategy is to wait until it is absolutely unbearable, then use the internet to find a place in the world that is even hotter. Then I go eat food from that culture, figuring they've probably got it figured out. It's often Indian food - mango lassi...