I'm back. It's hot.

On the flight back from BlogHer*, I was seated right in the center of a group of airline attendants who delighted in relating stories involving customers and sickness and bodily fluids spilling in public areas. (This was especially charming as I was at that moment psyching myself into ingesting a slice of limp, nasty airplane pizza. It was revolting, but I forgot to load up my bag with snacks, and I need to eat every 23 minutes or I die.) The man in this group was determined to involve me in their chatter, but I wasn’t having it. I almost came to his rescue when he made a Peter Frampton reference and the young ladies in his company didn’t know who he was talking about. “Really? ‘Frampton Comes Alive’? This isn’t ringing any sort of bells?” he said, and then beseeched me with his eyes to tell him that he wasn’t as old as they now suspected, but he was, and I didn’t. I wanted to read my book. This was an unprecedented opportunity to read more than one page at a sitting, and I wasn’t giving it up for some overly talkative steward of the skies.

Toward the end of the flight he kept handing me Fun Packs of M&Ms. I wish I could tell you why. He was so proud that he could go in the back and get all the M&M Fun Packs he wanted. But I didn’t want them, and this made him sad. Over and over, he waved them in my face, I shook my head, he insisted, I put them in my purse and kept reading. After we landed he tried to give me another one, and I barked, “Fucking hell, do you think I’m eight?” and he blushed and I took the damn thing.

Anyone want a Fun Pack of M&Ms? I have 38 of them. They may have lost their integrity, however, as it is 156 degrees here. With the humidity, the heat index is 218.

Now that it’s 397 degrees outside, Charlie the Dog and I differ over the appropriate amount of time for him to spend basking in the sun. For me the ideal amount of time is zero seconds. I told him this, and he said, “For me it’s zero times infinity, Dude!” and I had to tell him that anything multiplied with zero equals zero. We argued over that for a while, and then he decided that he loves the sun to infinity times infinity, PLUS zero; I don’t know why he had to add the zero. I suspect it’s pride.

It doesn’t matter that the sky is on fire and the tree sap is boiling and causing the tree limbs to shoot straight up into the flaming sky and strike the sun, which causes more molten sun bits to rain down on us. Charlie wants to lie down on our asphalt driveway as it turns to soup and his bones become cinders. I placed a bowl of water next to him and he looked at me like, you wimp. Water is for cowards. I do not fear a little heat.

So I said, okay, dog. You want to die, knock yourself out. I stood by the door and watched him because I didn’t mean it. Approximately two minutes later, he lurched himself up to standing. His lips curled at the corners and he staggered to the side of the yard and puked his doggy guts out.

Now will you listen? I asked him, but he ignored me. I tried to drag him inside. He headed right back to the sunny patch of asphalt. This sun, he said, is lovely.

As I was cursing and trying to drag the dog back inside, Henry came out to see what was the matter. “Charlie won’t go inside,” I said, and he asked why, and I said, “He’s a little dumb.”

This was a mistake. Henry balled up his fists and pointed them at me. “He is NOT DUMB,” he screamed. “That is NOT A NICE thing to say.”

Now, Henry calls everything dumb. It is in fact his favorite word. Everything is dumb. Shoes are dumb. The pool yesterday was dumb, as people were splashing. Splashing is also dumb. Peeing in the toilet is dumb. That’s dumb , he says by way of explanation. He says it sadly and with great pity. I can’t eat this grilled cheese, you see, because it is, well, dumb.

I thought dumb was an apt word for a being who actively seeks out heat stroke, but now I had to apologize. And Henry called Charlie, who got right up and trotted back inside, and they both looked back at me in disgust.

Actually only Henry looked back at me. Charlie didn’t because he’s an idiot.

*What can I say that hasn’t been said? It was amazing, overwhelming, frustrating, exhausting, fantastic, etc.. I met so many great people and have so many new blogs to read. And I’ll get right on that, as soon as the temperature dips below 634.

Yogurt-dipped mornings, alcohol-soaked evenings

Here are two excerpts from emails I sent to Scott. In the first one, I reveal my true dorkiness:

“Today, as in the next few days to come, Melissa and I had the incredible hotel breakfast of meats and cheeses and pastries and cereals and eggs and other meats and yoghurts (with an h!). I enjoyed a small yoghurt beverage, just to see how the natives liquefy their yogurt. I thought it was unflavored, but then I tasted it and realized it was a berry-flavored delight; after inspection I saw a tiny image of a strawberry on the label. Melissa and I discussed how if this were American packaging there would be an enormous anthropomorphized strawberry wearing shades and skateboarding across the label, and it would be called EXTREME STRAWBERRY BLAST, and this was so funny to me at that moment that yoghurt drink almost came out of my nose.

Look how much has happened, and it’s still breakfast.”

And then I try to redeem myself with more adult-style beverage choices:

“Well, here's the email you knew would show up eventually: the one where I'm completely drunk. Hi, sweetheart! Baby had some drinks! We went out with a reader of our blogs, a gorgeous Swede named Monica, who took us to a tiny bar crammed with locals and proceeded to charm the pants right off of all of us. And I really liked those pants. We enjoyed much jenever (pronounced ye-NAV-er--these Dutch say everything all funny), which is sweet and many-flavored (I had applecake, blackberry, prune, and maybe more but everything gets fuzzy after that), and because it’s so sweet you really have to have it with beer. So I had many of them! With beer! And then on to another pub, where I had more beer. The jenever is actually not particularly strong, but the thing is, it fools you into thinking, hmm, it's like cider! Or a lovely medicine of some sort! And then you can't stand upright.”

Not surprisingly, I ended that last email with “I love you so much I'm crying.” This is why I don’t drink more. Melissa.

Warning, Dutch people: the American idiots are here.

Melissa and I were sitting on a bench at the Rijksmuseum when a kind-faced elderly woman approached us, a guard guiding her by the elbow toward the bench. We immediately rose to give her our seats, but instead of, say, sitting down, she began chittering at us with some sort of urgency in Dutch. It seemed like time stopped while her mouth continued to open and close, open and close, while she squawked and clicked and yooped and eccched. We stared at her, frozen in terror, finally managing to summon enough strength to back away. And as we did, Melissa murmured, “I don’t speak what you’re talking.”

Then we hid around the corner, which was about five inches from where the old woman was sitting, and we snorted with laughter until my father came to take us away. I'm sure the poor woman is still wondering why they let the feeble-minded wander unescorted through a museum.

Craving for a tan.

.

Strangely enough, I am also craving for a tan, or better yet, a sunburn, and the rise in body temperature that would accompany it. It is cold here, nipple-invertingly cold; I'm no stranger to the cold but with the wind whipping off the canals HOLY CRAP it's cold.

My first-day impressions, clouded as they were by a thick haze of sleep deprivation, were recorded in an email to my husband:

"Getting to the train? And then the tram? From the airport? Not an easy experience for someone who probably right now can't tie her own shoes. There's no way to figure out which tram goes where and you need a special ticket to take the tram and how do you pay for the ticket? No way to know! Everything's in Dutch! We finally figured out that we had to buy the ticket at the bookstore in the train station, where we lamely were all American and like "GIVE US TICKET PLEASE" and they were all "Thank you for not learning a single word of Dutch."

I don't even know how to say thank you.

Then we got to the hotel, which is an amazing place--I may spend the rest of my time here in the bathtub, and if Melissa wants to hang out with me, well, she'll just have to climb in--but they wanted me to fill out forms, and seriously I couldn't do it. If someone had handed me an IQ test right then and there I would have pulled out a brown crayon and scrawled I LIKE NAPS across it. I thought I had lost my passport and proceeded to have a full-scale panic attack, which was nipped in the bud .5 seconds later when I found my passport. Melissa gazed down upon me in pity. "

Then before I could hit "send" I passed out on my keyboard.

If anyone in Amsterdam wants to get drinks with us, email me. Melissa needs company in her quest to drink more than a single beer, and I'm not up to the task. Yet.