It's Hot
Ok, for those of you who get squeamish about visual imagery, you might want to stop here and wait for the next post. For the rest of you, well, if you follow along, it gets pretty gross.So, it goes without saying that it's hot here. Sometimes, it's really hot here. Given that the New Embassy Compound (NEC) is, well, new, there aren't a lot of trees, which means not much shade. There are a lot of buildings designed to withstand the periodic mortar round (i.e. heavy masonry), lots of hard pavement (asphalt, concrete, paving stones) and, for the time being at least, T-walls. T-walls are giant concrete barriers used to cordon off areas (think Israeli-built walls running through the West Bank, or the walls we used to separate neighborhoods in Baghdad when the sectarian violence became just too much) or as blast walls to isolate the effect of potential explosive devices (they apparently do a very good job of that too).
So where am I going with this? Heat. All of these hardened surfaces just love the sun, which there is a lot of. They get hot. Not only do they get hot, they radiate heat. Not just in the evenings when things cool down, but in the heat of the day. So while you may have the sun on your back, you can also perceptively feel heat radiating from below you, to your right, left or even in front of you depending on how close you are to walls while you're walking. Waves and waves of heat as you walk down the street. Coming from any massive body that has absorbed lots of it. A household oven is not an apt description, though if I were a pizza (and I am not), I suspect it's more like the brick ovens you have at fancy pizza joints than the plain old oven we have at home (that, or the frozen pizza manufacturers just don't know how to make a good pizza). Though when there is a breeze, it can feel like a brick oven with convection heating.
The human body is an amazing machine. It is adaptable to a wide variety of conditions, and adapts not only instantaneously to sudden changes in the environment, but over time to overall climactic conditions. I've been told that, while there is a big difference between 100 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit, there are also perceptible differences between 120 and 130, and again to 140. I can only speak to 120. I am simply amazed at how quickly I've adapted. Now, I'm not ready to go out there and play beach volleyball (oh what an ugly site that would be) for hours on end, but I can get from point A to point B a half-mile away in the mid-day sun and not feel like a hot-dog at a 4th of July barbecue. In fact, I can feel pretty good. That is except for the eyes.
Yes, this posting is about eyeballs, and if you didn't take my earlier warning seriously, here's your final chance to reconsider; your last chance to bail. How to put it? I don't recall if it was discussed in my high school biology class, but I don't think that the eyes have any way of cooling themselves. They try to stay moist, which I guess can allow for some degree of evaporative cooling to come into play; but believe me it doesn't help. So while I may be walking from point A to point B, and I can tell that my body is adapting to the heat, I can also tell that my eyes are not and they feel like they are, literally, baking inside my head. It's not like the surface becomes dry and scratchy. Nope, not fried eggs. This feeling is distinctly baking. The whole eye, both eyeballs, all at once. Sometimes it feels like it's from the inside out. My body might break a sweat in an effort to keep my body temperature down, but the eyes just bake. So the above image of a boiling egg isn't exactly right, it's not like my eyes are boiling - I'm sure that would feel different - instead they're baking. Though, I guess the end result would be the same - two hard-boiled eggs (without the shells) inside my eye sockets. Pretty gross stuff.
Obviously, my eyes have not baked to a solid. If they did, I'd be in the hospital right now. And the feeling goes away very quickly once I get inside. So I make sure I drink lots of fluids and stay in reasonably temperate rooms whenever possible. I limit, to the extent I can, how much time I spend outside during the heat of the day. But it does make me wonder what it would be like to get stranded out in the desert. I guess I don't really want to find out. Nor do my eyeballs.
That's the thought for the day.