This week’s title, dear readers, was super difficult . As you may remember, I spent the previous week cat sitting for friends in another part of the city. It wouldn’t be so bad if the temperature hadn’t been 34 degrees. I know my southwestern readers might be snickering a bit at these temperatures as they routinely get quite a bit higher. And that’s all well and good. But here in the Netherlands, that is considered a heat wave and in a place where houses are designed to keep the heat in, rather than let it out, it gets to be a real problem. In the States, we are quite used to going from our air-conditioned houses, to our air-conditioned cars, to our air-conditioned offices and of course, to air-conditioned shops and shopping list.
This is not the case in other parts of the world. In most of the world air conditioning is considered a bit of a demon-esque inventions. Routinely in southern climes, particularly in Greece, you hear “don’t put the air-conditioning on it will make you sick”. While you may not hear such drivel in the Netherlands, the country is simply not equipped to handle the temperatures that we’ve been experiencing over the last two weeks. And there had been no respite until Friday of this week. What has this to do with teaching, you ask? Sit back relax and enjoy your air conditioning while I tell you.
I have discovered as I get older that the heat really does affect me very badly. I am certainly not at my best when teaching or doing anything else. You could really see it in the quality of my teaching if you look at playback videos throughout the last couple of weeks. I’m lucky in that I can make it a teachable moment and frequently have my older students compare and contrast the weather in China with the weather in central Europe. In short, it affected everything. The end of every day saw me literally melting. For my private students, I must’ve sounded like a bumbling idiot. Confusing homographs and homophones with Scarlet is one example. Let’s hope I’m able to do better this coming week.
Why didn’t you get a fan, you ask? That’s just it. I had two going at my friends house and I have one of my own. They were, and have been, constantly running to the last couple of weeks. I shudder to think what my electric bill is going to come out to this month. But at this moment, I am past caring. I also mentioned to Jasper that when we get a house of our own we are going to have to have some form of air-conditioning if this continues. Luckily, he has agreed. He also made the claim that the temperature changes in the last 10 years in the Netherlands  are more significant than the 90 years that came before.
Given these fact,s I am amazed that people still believe that global warming is not a thing and that this is nature taking it’s course. Further evidence to my mind of peoples idiocy in so many ways. The summer heat wave has also seen a spike in people traveling and being on boats here and so we have the inevitable spike in COVID-19 cases. This is a worldwide phenomenon. In Greece, on the island of Crete where my sister and her family live, there were no cases until they started letting tourists in, now they have 50 cases per day.
 Remember how we had been planning to do a write-in online with the critique group this past Wednesday? Yeah, that never happened as it was simply too hot to do anything. We could barely maintain a conversation for more than an hour. At that point, I had to go and cool off. Luckily the temperatures have regulated this week and I never thought that I would say that I was quite happy for a thunderstorm and the rain that we’ve been getting. While it is still sticky, the weather looks to be quite good for a day trip that we are taking with some friends who are also VIPKid teachers to another part of the Netherlands.
Last but not least, dear readers, a couple of friends and I had a witchcraft and wizardry Geo locating game that was a virtual scavenger hunt in Amsterdam on Saturday this past weekend. I have decided that while I am not very good at these games I really do like them, as much as I like escape rooms and would like to do more of them. The riddles were quite easy but the math questions were not. If you’ve never tried the scavenger hunt take games, check out CluedUpp GeoGames for ones that might be in your city.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always there is more to come.
Inkreadable 