Looovely pizza dinner, Gotham scenery

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While our pizza crust was a'rising, T water vacuumed the basement (Percy and his damn acting-out pee), and I painted some scenery for tomorrow's fete. Jack will be pleased I think. The black and white images make a panel; J is big into Batman being called with the signal. Fun! And the pizza was a success too. Not only am I really glad we got the pizza stone -you might know how I feel about bread cooked on a grill; sublime- but also I must say that this super-techy/nerdy infrared thermometer that Tom wanted (and I really made fun of initially) is very useful. Tonight's demo is: assessing the temp of the stone.

While enjoying our 'za, we watched a documentary on the Earth Liberation Front. Good film, definitely intense. I was actually anxious at some moments. Very interesting. Off to bed.

Heat-induced snarkiness

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Having grown up in the tropics that are SW Louisiana, I'm relatively immune to high temps. No, the past few days of 96-100 degree weather have not been particularly pleasant, but I have that weird Southern, predominantly female ability to handle extreme heat with little to no sweat or major discomfort. This is a definite plus in the attribute column. Others do not deal with inferno-days terribly well, however, and I really think the protracted hot weather is getting to a lot of them. I cannot even tell you the degree of irritability I witnessed all around town today; the cashier at Whole Foods actually shook my kale at me when I said that a) it wasn't red dandelion greens, and b) it wasn't $3.49, as it had rung up. He said "no, it's kale!" I said, "right, and the kale is $2.49". The shaking then commenced, and he said I should go look at the sign because organic is more. I went to the damn sign, pulled it down from the display shelf and casually walked its "Organic Red Kale, $2.49" self back to him. Mr. Cashier fussed and fritzed, called over a colleague, she proceeded to give the flipping bunch to me for $1.49, and he refused to say goodbye. Get a grip, man. In addition, I saw a wreck, some serious other-driver eye-rolling and a number of behaviors that generally suggest folks are not in a great way. It's supposed to be worse tomorrow which is really terrific since Jack's party is an outdoor, old-fashioned games event. Alert DC has issued a warning that the projected temp of 105 is "torrid" and thusly there is an extreme heat-watch in effect.

This is unfortunate news. My house is not of the size to accommodate 14 children beating a piñata, doing sack and egg-on-a-spoon races, and snaking through hula chains inside. The sprinklers are at the ready, and I splurged and had 25 gourmet popsicles delivered today, both perhaps vain attempts to ward off dehydration and heat stroke in children who are not mine. In any case, we'll forge ahead and hope for a brief reprieve from roughly 2:15-3:15p. I need to go paint Gotham City scenes and check on our pizza dough...