It’s hot today, the first real hot day of the year. According to the thermometer outside my living-room window, it’s 84°F (30°C) in the sun. It’s too hot to be comfortable in the sun–and, anyway, we’re heeding the standard advice to limit sun exposure between ten o’clock and two o’clock–so the little kids and I are holed up inside with the blinds drawn and the fans whirring. Poor Olof is down in Uppsala today and tomorrow, where it’s even hotter. I talked to him an hour or so ago and he was on the bus from the airport into the city, unlucky him. There aren’t many places more miserable to be in the heat than in a bus with no air conditioning (I might even go so far as to say there aren’t many places more miserable to be than in a bus, period, but that’s another post for another time).

Later on, once we’ve got some shade on the porch, I think I’ll take the kids outside and maybe fill up the little tub for them to splash around in. They’re both pretty grimy and a little soak in some clean water wouldn’t come amiss. With any luck I’ll be able to find the hose and won’t have to fill it with thirty or forty pitchers full of water toted out from the bathroom.