water

June is the hottest month here. That's what they say. July and August you get the monsoons, but June, just sun, sun, sun. It's been hot, 90-ish some days, like today. In New York 90 is brutal. Here, it's dry heat, but it's still pretty brutal. I heard on the radio the humidity is 5%. It reminded me, oh yeah, we're in the desert. Quite a change to adjust to. It makes sense to do things early in the morning- midday is very quiet. And people get up early here.

I have a swamp cooler and I turn it on usually around 3 or 4 o'clock when the day is as hot as today, which is a thing on the roof that works by pumping water through a fan in some way and blowing it into the house. It's pretty effective, actually. I have to turn it off after a few hours when it gets too cold. Nights are cool and I leave the windows open and hope that I'm not woken up by barking dogs or neighbors getting up at the crack of dawn. Like this morning, there was thumping and conversation at 6:30 AM. I didn't go back to sleep. I thought about how hard it is for me to get up at 6:30 for school- but this morning the sun was streaming in and it hardly seemed early.

Water is the answer to almost anything. When I'm feeling tired or dizzy, I drink water. Staying hydrated. That's the key. When I first got here someone told me to drink and drink and drink. It helped, because I didn't get the usual altitude headache, or at least, not too bad a headache. But I still get lightheaded. You don't realize how parched you are or how hot you are, because you're not really sweating. But you are parched, and you are hot, and the sun is relentless, and so you have to keep drinking water.

When I first got here three weeks ago, there was water in the river and it was beautiful. Now it's dry again and I wish I had taken a photo. It snowed a lot this winter, all the way into April and even early May, so there was a lot of water run-off. They've just about finished the river walkway and I've been running on it in the mornings.

Lots of art world luminaries in town this weekend for the opening of the SITE Santa Fe Biennial. This year the whole show is animation, but they didn't want to call it a show of animation because that sounded like something you'd see on Saturday morning TV. I'll post more about it when I have a chance to spend some time in there. I've been volunteering and last night my job was to keep people from touching the scrims hung throughout the space which hold the screens. It was a cocktail party for the big givers, so no one touched the scrims. I did direct a few people to the restrooms.

I'm pretty sure I saw Shirley MacLaine there.