I’m sorry about yesterday, but I worked the Boston Marathon and the standing and the heat got to me. My job is volunteer lunch distribution at Copley Square where the marathon ends. We put bags of chips and stuff together, pass them and sandwiches out and feed around 1000 people. The tent was quite warm in the 85° heat. Luckily it was going to become an auxiliary medical tent so they started air-conditioning at eleven, and that felt great. We had to be finished our jobs by noon, and we did. I then walked to the T at Arlington, rode to Quincy, got my car and drove home. When I got home at 2:30, having left at 6:40, I weighed writing Coffee against taking a nap. You know what won!

The city was filled with people. All the outdoor cafes had no empty tables, and people were just meandering or heading to the Sox game or going to watch part of the marathon. The Public Garden had people sitting on benches enjoying the coolness of the shade from trees overhead. I sighed as I sat down in the air-conditioned T car. It was just too darn hot for mid-April.

The Cape reached the low 70’s yesterday and is 73° right now. The sun is hot. No rain is in the forecast, and everything is really dry. A red flag alert has been posted which means we have critical fire weather conditions. My lawn water system was turned on today as my grass is already brown in spots where there is no shade. I remember complaining a few weeks back about three days in a row of rain, and I guess Mother Nature took it to heart.

When I was working, I used to go Europe every April vacation. I went a few times with my sister and several times with my parents. We seldom had a set route or destination. We’d mostly stay in one country the whole week and stop when we were tired. My favorite country was Portugal, but my favorite trip was the one with my parents and my sister when we traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands. We laughed a lot especially after we got stopped at a border station by a very angry guard. It seems we had driven back and forth through the border three times trying to find our road. We explained, but he was not amused. We looked solemn enough while he reprimanded us, but once on our way we had to laugh at the whole adventure. There he was sitting in his guard-house watching us fly by him not once but three times. Good thing we were just stupid tourists!