This heat is driving me mad

September is the worst month of the year here. It is not just hot, very hot, it is also very humid. The sweat drips off you day and night, unless you have air conditioning which we don’t, and doing even the simplest jobs becomes a chore.

Dominicans seem to cope with it much better than I do, and they do intelligent things like sleep or sit on the patio in a rocking chair.  I on the other hand get grouchy, and things that I can normally cope with become great frustrations. Everything seems much worse when it is hot.

 This is what has done my head in this week.

1. The water tank on the roof was leaking. Solution was to empty the tank, repair with a patch, refill and job done. The menfolk turned on a tap in the kitchen to empty the tank and decided it was not emptying fast enough. Personally I would have turned all all the taps and showers in the house, but no, it was decided I knew nothing and the intelligent solution was  to cut through the main pipe from the tinaco with my bread knife.

Result was it emptied quicker, but then had to buy new piece of pipe, stick it to old pipe with the heat from a candle and taypee, then wait for 2 days for tinanco to dry so patch set. Result no water for two days, and I had to shower with a bucket  – remember it is very hot.  Now all back to normal. I am just waiting for the pipe to start leaking.

2. The cutlery drawer. I was under the obviously misguided impression that those plastic things you put in the drawer for cutlery had different segments so that the knives could go in one place, the forks another.

I was wrong. Everything gets thrown in everywhere. It doesn’t matter how much I yell, how much I sort, nothing changes. I can cope most of the time, but not at the minute when it takes all my energy to open the drawer let alone spend an hour looking for a teaspoon.

3. Youngest step son does the cooking, which is just as well as if it was up to me in this heat we would be living on sandwiches with no cooking required. When he opens the essential maggi stock cube, which goes in everything he cooks,  I would walk two yards to the rubbish bin in the kitchen and put the empty foil wrapper in there. Too much effort.

Open the cutlery draw and throw it in there. Why? So not only do I have to hunt for my teaspoon, I have to wade through loads of shreds of foil and crumbs of stock cubes. I can just feel the cockroaches rubbing their paws together in anticipation of their midnight feast.

4. The electricity is rubbish at the minute. Off 12 hours a day, and now, when it is roasting hot, they seem to have decided to turn it off at night too. The inverter cannot cope with running 15-20 hours a day, so bed time becomes a blissful time of lying naked on top of the covers, soaking wet with sweat, listening to the mosquitos whining in your ears about to strike and praying that the electricity will come on. You call them up to ask what the problem is, they tell you there is a problem, no idea when it will be fixed, and wish you a good night. GRRR.

5. Finally toothpaste. When I was a marketing lecturer I used to explain that people used to squirt their toothpaste the length of the brush.

If the manufacturers wanted us to use more they made the brush heads longer, or the hole in the tube  wider, and we blindly carried on in the same way, but using more toothpaste. In actual fact, according to dentists,  you only need a little squirt, not even the whole length of the brush.

Recently we appear to have been getting through a lot of toothpaste. Imagine my horror last night when husband brushed his teeth and I saw him squirting the toothpaste on the brush. Not just the full length of the brush, but twice, once on top of the other. A DOUBLE DECKER line of tooth paste.

So those are the things driving me mad this week. I am sure there will be more next week and the week after that until it gets cooler in November!