Creatively HOT

It's definitely summer time now! And it is HOT! In our little corner of the planet, the temperatures are totally soaring, much higher than normal. Now, I realize we cannot complain at all... in other parts of the country, this is just a normal day. But for Oregon, it doesn't get beastly hot on a regular basis. Normal summer temperatures reaching the mid 80's is what we are used to. But for the next 5 days, we should in the low hundreds. That's dang hot for us! And since most people don't have air conditioners in our city... that makes for some grumpy, hot people when the temperatures spike.

But, we do what we need to, to stay cool. Drink lots of water, head to the swimming pool, eat soft serve ice cream, and modify our play structures..

Modify play structures? Yup. It seems that having extreme heat conditions causes our minds to do some wacky things. On most days we would look at the back yard play structure built for the kids and not think anything of it. We'd look at the swimming pool sitting in the corner and think to ourselves "we should clean that out someday". But take a beastly hot day and suddenly... in true Calvin fashion.. the creativity flows.

I discovered this phenomenon a few weeks back, after coming home to find the family in the backyard. My wife had carefully rigged up the pool in such a way that it sat just below the play structure, so that when the kids came down the slide, they'd land in the big pool of water. Suddenly, the hot day wasn't so bad as the kids focused on their new "water park" in the backyard.

Same thing happened yesterday when we went over to our friends, the Gardner's House, for a barBQ. And with their extra large structure, slide and pool, he was able to raise the slide up in the air, now resting on blocks (much to his wife's eye rolling) so that the kids could come sailing down the slide at top speed, and almost FALL into the water, creating giant splashes. This now serves a dual purpose.. it keeps the kids wet, cool and distracted from the heat, AND it provides hours of entertainment for the adults, watching the kids crash, flop, scrape and land in all sorts of bizarre ways.

I just find it interesting that extreme conditions can bring out the kids in us all, as we work to creatively solve the problems that we don't have to face everyday. Maybe we need more heat... hmmmmm. On second thought... maybe not. I'll just go curl up next to the air conditioner before its time to leave for the weekend camping trip... nothing like a campfire in the 100 degree heat! I'll be curious as to what creativity shows up there!