If you can't take the heat...

Hello my dear friends -

I am back from Vegas, which means that I didn't win it big and then triumphantly quit working for The Man this morning. I lost $60 (spread across three Wheel of Fortune twenty-five cent slot machines at three different casinos) - but luckily my husband won that and a little more back in blackjack right before we left.

Our Vegas exploits will be covered over a series of posts in the coming weeks, but the first thing I must mention was the ungodly heat. I should preface this tirade with the fact that I LOVE heat. Have you ever played the game with your friends where you ask them dumb questions like, "If you could have any superpower, what would it be?" or "If you had to be a liquid, solid or gas, what would you be?" Well, my answer to "If you HAD to be either too hot or too cold for the rest of your life, which would you pick?" is certainly "I'd rather be too hot." I can stand extreme heat - I don't know why. Whenever relatives visit Chicago in the summer and I am running them all over the place and everyone is sweating buckets, I am not fazed in the slightest. I hate air conditioning, I always carry a wrap or a fleece with me, and am rarely not cold, even in the depths of summer. I met my match in Southeast Asia a few years ago - Thailand and Singapore were two places where the heat (mostly because of the humidity) was nearly unbearable. But then I went to Las Vegas in mid-June.

I'm not sure if you can make it out, but the picture in this post is of the outside temperature as recorded in our friend's rental car.

Yes, it reads 110 degrees.

110 degrees has officially become my heat tolerance level. In fact, it's actually more like 105, because Saturday and Sunday hovered around that temperature, and it was still too much for me. All weekend, even when booking it between casinos right next to each other on the Strip, my skin felt like it was being seared off and I became faint after minutes. Good thing Margaritaville is strategically placed in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard!

More soon,
- e