For anyone living in Europe: the first heatwave of the season is forecast for tomorrow, and will likely stretch until Friday. Please stay safe.
Open your windows at night BUT close everything, including blinds and curtains, during the day
If you need it, buy a fan, a cold blanket or a cooler
Drink a lot
Also drink mostly water, without ice
If you can, avoid getting out in the sun between 11am and 6pm
If you need to go outside, wear sunscreen and a hat
Also loose clothes and natural, breathable fabrics
Think of your pets!
Make sure they have access to water and shade, bring them inside the house if possible, don’t leave them in a car alone
Check on your grandma and other elderly relatives!
Old people are at risk during hot weather, so remind them to drink and stay inside with their blinds closed
If you or people you know are experiencing the following symptoms
breathlessness
chest pain
confusion
intense thirst
weakness
dizziness
cramps that get worse or don’t go away
call an ambulance.
I’m really worried about these temperatures, I hope everyone stays safe!!
As someone from the southern US, a few pieces of additional advice:
Sweating is a sign that your body is doing what it’s supposed to in hot weather and trying to cool you off. If nothing about your environment has change, but you’ve stopped sweating, you’re dehydrated.
Water is great, but gatorade and powerade were specifically designed to replace important electrolytes you lose when sweating.
If the heat and humidity get to be too much for you and you have access to one, put your hair up and take a short, cool shower.
Sounds silly, but get a spray bottle and keep it in the fridge. If you’re going outside to do things like yardwork, take it with you and give yourself an occasional misting. Very refreshing!
What coffeebuddha has written is really awesome advice. Being that it gets up into the 100s here in DFW, Texas (that’s Fahrenheit, of course) I routinely make my house a cave and I mushroom for a great deal of the summer. I make sure my errands get done as early in the day as the stores will allow with their hours, and I actually walk in the early early morning when the sun isn’t up yet. I am very fair-skinned and sunburn easily, and am very susceptible to heat rash and other lovely heat-induced issues, so being a mushroom is very good for me.
Arizonans (and other US southwesterners) treat summer the same way northerners treat winter – the outside is trying to kill you. Dress appropriately. Carry or wear protection if you’re going outside (hats, umbrellas). Remember that wearing natural fibers will cool you off better than baring more skin. Have more water (or gatorade) around than you think you’ll need. Stay out of the sun as much as possible. Dont walk your dogs on hot pavement.
And remember to eat. The heat will make you think you dont need to. Do it anyway. Light foods, like fresh fruits or veggies, will help.
Okay but I don’t think ya’ll appreciate this as much as you should! Figuring out the places of ancient buildings — Roman, Celtic etc — tends to be a bit of a challenge. You have to consider the fact that the land has changed quite a lot over the centuries, with buildings popping up here and there, the topography changing dramatically, rising and falling like no one’s business, forests and cliffs being cut down or collapsing into the sea.
Basically, the descriptions we have of sites in old ass texts can be a nightmare to match up to modern day locations. Some, like Chester and London, are easy. We kept building on them. It’s why there’s an amphitheatre in the middle of Chester and the Roman Wall.
But in other parts of the country its a heck of a lot harder to locate and identify places.
There’s this show called Time Team (or sth like that, it’s been a long long time) and they basically went around the UK digging up ancient sites that they tried to find through radar and aerial imagery etc etc. That requires a fair amount of planning and technology (aka the bane of field budgets everywhere). And even with those and all the nice little people digging away and the photographs and radar imagery, they still had issues figuring out the direction a building went in, which way the wall ran, if this was part of a house or not and so on.
The heatwave and drought about to happen if it doesn’t frickin rain, is useful in that it allows us to see these sites without loads of planning and resources as they are today. We can identify places we’ve not been able to identify, locate sites we’ve wanted to locate for ages, because of the nifty little thing the dirt does when it gets hot and dry and like Satan’s breathing on everything.
And that means that those sites can be logged down, and the modern topography won’t be such a bitch to try and figure out for locations because that heatwave has saved a lot of time and effort!
Basically, don’t be surprised if in the next year or so, there are more reports and research papers about archaeological digsites in the UK from the Bronze Age or the Iron Age because this right here, this damned benighted hellish summer heat, will have been the cause of it all.
Which makes me a little more tolerant of Satan and his dick ass breathing.
