I would like to find the person who says it's always rainy and cool in Seattle and beat him or her senseless with a wet noodle. The past few days have been exactly the opposite of weather that one would expect in Seattle.

It's bad enough that we haven't gotten hardly any rain this spring and summer. Now I'm paranoid about mowing my large side yard because it's nothing but rocks and dirt now, and I cannot see the rocks before I run over them with the lawnmower. I've taken to wearing safety glasses when I mow because I'd rather not lose my eyesight. Plus I have no living grass anywhere on the property, yet we seem to get just enough rain to allow the dandelions to flourish. This means I still have to mow. Blecch.

Then add to the lack of rain the fact that it was in the upper 90s the last three days. Yes, you read correctly -- NINETIES. According to the weather program that lives on my desktop, WeatherBug, it was actually over 100^o on Friday. Of course, it's a dry heat, so it's not as bad as it sounds -- until you remember that houses and a lot of businesses out here don't have cooling systems.

To beat the heat, my friend HC and her kids and I went to an indoor pool Friday morning, during Family Swim. It was a good time to go because most of the folks there were stay-at-home parents with small children. There were a few larger kids that were the type to run into you and think nothing of it, but there were certainly no kids over the age of about ten or eleven. Very nice. Most were babies and toddlers. I teased HC because she put her kids in traditional swim suits, without any kind of flotation devices. I don't see a need for kids to have flotation devices in their swimsuits or attached to them when you're in a pool that features a walk-in shallow end that is only 6" deep, and an indoor pool at that! I could see it when you're in a lake or some body of water outside with currents and whatnot, but not an indoor pool. If your kid is nervous about the water, you need to be right there with him to reassure him. But anyhow.

It was when we got home after making a trip to lunch and to my favorite consignment store (where I bought three gowns for the baby as well as a onesie, and two shirts for myself for just $20!) that I noticed that WeatherBug was reading 101^o! Just for grins and chuckles I checked the weather in Tucson, which said that it was in the 80s because a rainstorm was about to hit. Yes it does rain in Tucson -- it's called the monsoon season. So I just had to call my in-laws to tell them it was hotter in Seattle at that moment than it was in Tucson! I mean, what are the chances that will happen again?!? Of course, my father-in-law was surprised I'd call just for that, but hey, it's a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence!

But on Friday, the temperature in the house wasn't bad at all. Even though it was insanely hot outside, it was only in the low 80s inside, which is definitely an acceptable temperature. I had the fans going, so I had plenty of air circulation, so I was very comfortable.

Saturday was a completely different story. See, we can get away with not having air conditioning here in Seattle because it tends to get nice and chilly at night, and it's then that we get our houses all cooled off to prepare for the warm days. But that only works when it actually gets chilly at night. Friday night it only got down into the low 70s or high 60s, which is not cool enough to cool down the house. So it was already 80^o in the house when I woke up Saturday morning. It just progressively got hotter and hotter throughout the day. My original plan was to go downtown to the mall and Michael's to shop and stay in the air conditioning, but I didn't feel like driving that far. I thought I could stick it out in the house just fine, but about 4pm it just got way too hot. It was 90^o in the house by that time, and probably 99^o outside. I went to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, which wasn't really air conditioned either, and then spent another hour walking around my favorite grocery and health food store. But once the sun started to go down, the temperature began to plummet. And even now it's only 65^o, which makes me very happy. I can finally cool the house down!! Plus it was so lovely being actually cold last night as I was sleeping. I sleep so much better when it's cold in the bedroom.

I had a couple of bad days earlier in the week, though. On Wednesday, I went to my first childbirth class at the hospital, which was the most pointless two hours of my life. It was basically Intro to Labor and Delivery, or How the Baby Gets Out. Well, duh. Especially since I watch the show Birth Day at least once a day on the Discovery Health Channel. So I knew all the medical terms for everything they told us about, like if the baby poops before he's born (meconium) or what happens to ladies who have Group B strep (they get lots of antibiotics before and during labor) or how they induce labor (with pitocin).

But the hardest part was walking into that room and seeing everyone with their husbands or their mothers or both, and I had to walk into the room all by myself. J is going to be my labor coach, but she's in Hawaii right now at a basketball tournament that she's refereeing. Now that I'm almost eight months pregnant, it's the time where I'm supposed to be arranging the nursery and picking out the decor and getting the necessities together for the baby. And I have to do it all by my lonesome. I do realize that when I married a sailor, this is what came with the territory, but that doesn't mean I can't feel sad about it. It's like all the mothers who vent about their kids. If I can't vent about being married to a sailor and be forced to listen to "well you should have known that when you married a sailor," I should be able to tell a mother who's venting about what her son did that "you should have known that was going to happen when you had kids." We're all human, and we all have a need to vent. But it's rude to dismiss my feelings simply because I "should have known better" when I married a sailor.

I'm just really tired of having to do everything myself. It wouldn't be half so bad if Kurt were actually deployed and had a somewhat valid reason to be gone. But he's already been through the school he's attending, except it was for a different kind of ship. So he has to go through all that training all over again just because he's going to a new ship. Also, he's trying to get home early, but the way the Navy works is to try to do something before one figures out how it's supposed to be done. So his instructor told him he'll accelerate Kurt, but when he went to go get the next test a little early, he was told that Kurt couldn't be accelerated. Now they've pulled their heads out of their butts and figured out how they're SUPPOSED to go about accelerating someone, so now it's finally being done the right way, after Kurt's already been gone eight weeks. It's gotten so frustrating that I am tired of getting disappointed at every turn, and I just am going to count on his being home on September 10th and be done with it. Whether he's going to be here when the baby comes is another matter. But it's just way too stressful right now.

Plus the other thing that's bugging me is we're supposed to be enjoying the last few months of being a couple, before we turn into a family. It's the last few months of us being intimate without having to worry about the baby or whether our kids are going to walk in on us. It's the last few months that we can just pick up and go somewhere without worrying about all the baby stuff we'll have to pack before we leave. But he's not here, so there's not a whole lot to enjoy about this time. At this point, I'd rather just have the baby and get it over with so I can stop stressing over everything. And once I have someone else to worry about and take care of, his absences won't be so bad. At least, that's the hope -- that I will be too busy to miss him. Anything will be better than simply sitting home and waiting for him to return.

But enough about that. It's just been rough on me to be pregnant all by myself, and I do realize that military wives do it every day. That doesn't make it any easier when you're the one who has to do it.