Where has the summer gone? Today is the 20th - summer solstice.

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What's your favorite part of summer?

Love the summer. Favorite activity in the summertime is going for a daily, early morning walk. Mornings in the summer here are the greatest. Birds are singing. Usually, there's a slight breeze. Everything is green and full of life. Flowers are in full bloom. Love it!

My favorite part of summer is when it's over. Seriously, this is my least favorite season and always has been. I hate being hot, I burn easily, it's going to get to 110 fairly soon -- what's to love?

To be honest, though, we haven't had the bad stuff yet and things are quite tolerable. It's still green, still under 100 degrees (this is mild for us), and quite decent. The crepe myrtles are looking great and I have a ton of day lilies this year. No complaints here! If summer would stay like this I'd have a different opinion of it.

Last year we had the hottest summer they ever recorded: 110, 112, 109, 108 -- and on and on for nearly 3 months. We're bracing ourselves, but maybe this year will be better; I can hope for that and be cheerful. And if it's awful again, thank goodness for air conditioning.

I also hate being hot, Ellemm.

But lately I find that I get really cold on hot days when I'm in restaurants and shops where the A/C is turned down low.

So now I'm the woman carrying a jacket or sweater with me in the middle of a heat wave...

I am starting to think I may have lost my prior tolerance for temperature variances. Is that a post-menopausal thing?

Are you in Texas? I'm trying to guess where live are based on your comments about the weather... figure it has to be in the south.

I am in the south: Oklahoma. At least, it's definitely one of the oven spots in the US.

As for tolerating temperature variances, you could be right. I'm not going to know because I was very, very sick about 3 years ago and one of the side effects is that my thermostat is off. I tend to get hot really easily. For months I had huge chills followed by soaking sweats, so things have calmed down considerably. But about once a day at least I just get really, really hot and I don't think this is going to go away. Apparently this is fairly common when your system is hit really hard. It's a small price to pay: I'm alive.

I don't have the tolerance for extreme temperatures, hot or cold, any more either. I'm guessing it's post-menopausal, too. I still get really, really, hot sometimes; like hot flashes, where I have to go stick my head in the freezer to cool off! :-)

I did the same thing, Yonuh!

I have a side by side fridge/freezer and the other day I was so uncomfortable, I couldn't think of anything else to do except open the freezer door and stand there, basking in the outpouring of cold air.

In retrospect I bet my Dad, who was always hollering at us kids to close doors and not open the fridge to stare at the contents, would have had a fit if he'd seen me.

No one else knows I did this, except y'all!

By the way, I don't like the fridge/freezer - it came with the house. Each side is so narrow. i can't get full size frozen pizza into the freezer. I want one of those fridge/freezer combos where the fridge has french doors and the freezer is fairly large and on the bottom. Like these. Now all I need, apparently, is a bit over $3,000. Ouch!!

Our side-by-side is smallish, too. But if we had bought a bigger one to fit the space in the old house, it wouldn't have fit in the space in the new house. It's a tight fit as it is. There's a drawer on the bottom of the freezer, and to fit the frozen pizza in, we take it out of the box and stand it up in the drawer. I, too, would love one of the french door fridges, but way out of our price range, and would require taking out counter and cabinets in the kitchen. We have a galley kitchen, so a bigger fridge would require a major remodel, which we don't want to do. We're still doing the remodel for the new laundry/sewing room and don't have all the baseboards and moldings up yet in the rest of the house. Then we have to remodel both bathrooms to make them bigger and more useful. Never ends!

You're right, Yonuh. I think it'd take a major kitchen remodel to get one of those french door fridges in my kitchen.

So I'll just work on being thankful for what I have.

I know my daughter thinks that my kitchen -- in a house that is no more than 15 years old -- is heaven compared to what she works with in her 1940's era home. (They've remodeled a lot of their house, but not been able to do much with the less than functional layout of their kitchen.)

I'd love one of those big French-door-bottom-freezer fridges, but like the rest of you, our kitchen is too small. Our fridge is fairly large as it is and serves us well enough. But the kitchen is so tiny that when you open the fridge door it completely blocks all access between the kitchen and living room. Which isn't a problem when it's just the two of us, but whenever we have houseguests who want to help in the kitchen, it becomes quite an obstacle course in there! I think if we wanted to fit one of those bigger fridges in, we'd have to remodel the entire downstairs, not just the kitchen, lol!