The framework to this post is that here in the Pacific Northwest there is unrelenting heat. We’ve had no rain. Temperatures are in the high 80s and low 90s, which for some of us is unbearable. We are not an air-conditioner culture. The most we have is an AC sticking out of a bedroom window.

I don’t like extremes of temperature. I was born into what used to be a mild climate and that’s the way I like it. I’ve noticed over the years that extreme heat affects me in odd ways, ways that are reminiscent of PMS except without the uterine pain. Sweaty, headachey, nauseated, dizzy and unusually petulant.

This week I announced that I am in the running for being the crabbiest woman on earth. I’ve been annoyed at the amount of push back, which you’d think might appease me but doesn’t.

My neighbor Gwen, who I ran into (not literally though it might have come to that) at the grocery store said she could beat me in her sleep not that either of us are getting much.

“When the hell are we doing another movie night? I expect you this weekend if I don’t throw you out.”

“Oh yeah? Get out of my way. You’re blocking the aisle.”

Other friends have challenged me. My neighbor Bill said if I expanded the category to Persons, he’d win hands down.

I feel like snapping at all of them, “I’m not looking for sympathy. Are you looking for a fight? Because I’ll take you.”

Here’s some of the fallout from my heat-induced bad mood: On Monday I made what I decided was my last call to a podiatry clinic before I asked my doctor to refer me somewhere else. It had been 2 months. I tried their number 4 or 5 times, went through their menu, got put on hold for half an hour at a time. I left messages.

Finally someone called me back to say they’d been “having a little trouble with their intake.” This helpful and informative person suggested I log onto their website and go into the patient portal and create an account although he wasn’t sure I would be successful because I wasn’t yet a patient.  Then I could send them a message and perhaps someone would be able to respond to me that way.

I’m not sure why I even went through these motions. Probably because I was feeling masochistic—and this was before the heat. In any case, I created the account and sent the message. A month went by. Nothing came of it.

Which brings me to the hot weather and getting the new roof on my house, the dust and the disturbance, all of which I have already written about. The roof got finished and I reclaimed my life. While burrowing through a mound of neglected paperwork, I found the clinic referral and decided to try one more time. I was put on hold. Before I shook the dust from my feet of this referral, I let loose with a piece of my mind, detailing all the steps I had taken over the past few months and ending—right before I started to sob—with “Are you even taking new patients?”

Two minutes later, a friend called. “Elena I picked up the message you just left at the clinic. I’m the receptionist here and I can’t imagine what went wrong all the other times you called! Let me take care of this.”

This particular friend is one of the calmest, most measured people I know. She’s smooth and gracious and completely unflappable.

I cringed, “Oh no! You heard my freak out. I’m so embarrassed.”

“No, no, not at all. I can get you all booked in right now. The doctor is wonderful. You’ll love him.”

In some ways, her graciousness made it worse. One never says rude things or, let’s face it, is hysterical over the phone to people one knows. Answering systems are as faceless as comment sections. Real people aren’t affected by hideous remarks –or so we tell ourselves if we even think that far.

Anyway, that was Monday.

By Wednesday, I was even less in charge of myself.  In the evening the OK Chorale was coming to my house for a potluck rehearsal, always one of the highlights of the quarter. Everything that Tim, my head –gardener, also a baritone in the Chorale, and I had done in the garden for the past month and half had been with the tag “before the potluck.” As in, this doesn’t need to be done before the potluck or I need this moved before the potluck—you get the idea. God this post is taking forever. See, I’m cranky.

Anyway the day of the potluck it was 94 degrees. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time or I would have just hanged myself and had done with it. I spent the day trying to stay calm and cool. I didn’t make any irritating phone calls or do anything requiring a lot of exertion. Tim was coming at 5:00 to help set up.

At 5:10 I texted him to ask when he was coming. No answer. At 5:30 he rang the front doorbell. Tim never comes to the front and never rings the doorbell. I opened the door and took one look at him grinning in what was probably a cheerful and anticipatory manner but that I read as sheepish.

“Are you drunk?” I demanded.

He looked wounded. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Because you seem a little weird right now.” Textbook projection.

I was on the edge of exploding into a tirade of everything he has ever done that irritated me and the list is long because we’ve been working together at this garden for four years and neither of us is used to collaboration. I managed to grab hold of the axe head that was my current existence and keep it firmly attached to the handle that was 64 years of social conditioning and apologized.

We went into the kitchen. I yanked open the refrigerator door and dislodged a bottle of sticky red liqueur that broke open on the floor. Glass fragments under my bare feet. Red wine like blood in the St Antoine district of Tale of Two Cities. I was Madame Defarge.

However no heads rolled. One of the Chorale members arrived and cheerfully wiped up the sticky mess declaring that she liked to be helpful making me feel worse than I already did.

Thursday morning was when I started telling people up front without saying hello that I was in a foul mood. People are so damn nice. That doesn’t help.