It’s been a hot weekend here in Kansas, with bright days of 100 degrees or very nearly. They have a nifty thing called a heat index here, which must have something to do with humidity because I never heard the term bandied about in Phoenix. As far as I can tell, it means that even if the mercury doesn’t say 100, it might as well be.

My coworkers speak of 100 degree days like snowstorms: not uncommon but infrequent enough to have their date of arrival, frequency, and severity noted. I’m still too fresh out of Arizona to fall into that camp: I know it’s been hot out, some days more than others, but it’s summer, and that’s the drill. You ice your coffee, close the shades to keep the sun out, and pass the time until the sunset with some knitting.

(As an aside, I *had* forgotten how late the sun can set. Here it’s only just begun setting earlier than nine, and the lingering dusk is quite pretty but disconcerting.)

Somehow, I’ve found myself working on two garter projects: one large blanket and one large washcloth. In starting the blanket, I got caught up in the excitement of the texture of mitered squares and forgot that a mile of garter stitch does not offer a lot of fodder for the little gray cells.

Halfway through the blanket, I started slowing down. I’m on a deadline, so I can’t set it aside for a day or two to work on something else, and when the weather’s so hot I don’t want to lug it to a coffee shop, so I made up a knitting game for myself: two rows of a mitered square, one row of a long-running UFO. The current offender is this New Log Cabin Washcloth, which I began in a desperate attempt to move the alien-colored cotton yarn out of my stash. I had set this one aside when I realized how many ends I’d have to weave in when it was done, but now, the speed of its comparatively short rows has bumped it up in the queue.

What about you all–how do you pass the hot days of late summer?