I'm now indebted to Erica for pointing me to this Ask Metafilter page about cheap options for cooling an apartment in the summer.

From the sounds of it, the person asking is living in an older building in maybe New York or Chicago, so the poor guy's dealing with a different kind of heat than I am. On the other hand, it has been 100 degrees or more here for the last week. That qualifies as pretty damn hot, even if it isn't as muggy as a bathouse full of fat gay men, to leech an apt simile off of Andrea. Weaning myself off my fanatic air conditioning dependence might be a good idea at least in the evenings here, though, when it cools off pretty nicely (hooray for elevation!).

That reminds me, Dr. Alice asked me how I was liking Las Cruces (some others have asked it as well; it's as if you care or something). I haven't posted about it because what I do here mostly is launch whiny tirades, and when it comes to my new habitat, I got no complaints, see? So New Mexico-wise, there's nothing to launch a whiny tirade about. I could gripe about the speed limit for the entire state*, barring the interstates, appearing to have been set at 35 miles per hour, but you know something? This is a little town, with little traffic, and it turns out that if I don't have to fight 700 pissy Dallasites to get where I'm going, doing 35 miles an hour isn't a bit rough at all, even if back in Dallas they shoot people for driving that slow, or at least accuse them of being from Arkansas.

So basically it's beautiful here and I love it. Really.

Foodwise (oh, you knew that was coming) I have become hooked on this and one of these weekends I mean to see about whipping up a batch. I'm a fan neither of stews nor of chili, but this stuff is heaven in a bowl.

*The boyfriend and I visited Albuquerque once--he's from there originally--and it was that way there, too. Ditto Santa Fe. So I'm guessing it's like that in most NM cities, but correct me if I'm wrong.