Hot weather and Canadian money

100 degrees today. Hot! We set a new record high temperature. It felt like an oven outside. My blood must be getting thin as the heat didn't seem all that bad to me. Then again, the humidity level was only 14%. It is very dry. The grass is drying up and starting to crackle when you walk on some of it.

Yesterday the high temperature was 97 degrees. And what did I go on that hot day? I cleaned my chimney. Yes, I know, not the thing to do on such a hot day. Why didn't I wait for a cooler day? Our nights are cool - even with 97 then 100, the overnight low was 51. My "air conditioning" is to open the windows and doors at night and leave them open. I also pull, from the chimney, the stove pipe that runs from the wood burning stove to the chimney. Heat rises. What better way to rid the house of heat than through a hole in the roof?

I hadn't cleaned the soot from last winter's burning, so that needed to be cleaned else the house got a "sooty" smell - and that is what happened the previous night after I opened the chimney.

Cleaning the entire stove pipe and chimney is a long and very dirty job and took much of yesterday.

Tonight it is not cooling off. Clouds came over around sunset and has trapped the heat in the Valley. It is still 76 degrees at midnight. I don't ever remember it being this warm at this time of night. This heat is giving me nightmares of being back in Minnesota with their terrible summer heat.

In today's heat I didn't do a whole lot other than finish watering the garden and checking the gopher traps. I did ride my bicycle uptown to a bank to change some U.S. dollars into Canadian money. The boat ride at the end of our hike from Glacier Park to Waterton Provincial Park asks for the fare to be exact change. I have a feeling the boat at the remote Goat Haunt end doesn't take credit cards.

The bank was very helpful. Initially the teller gave me $20 Canadian bills but I need $18 for the boat ride. The teller then broke a $20 into a $10 bill, seven $1 coins, eleven quarters, two dimes and nickel.

"Umm... I'm going to be hiking over 15 miles. All these coins are heavy. Don't you have more bills?"

The teller got her supervisor and they went into another locked drawer for more Canadian money and changed my $10 in coins into a $5 bill and $5 in dollar coins. That was the best I could do as Canada doesn't have paper $1 bills anymore.

The hike is all set. All I need is for Sunday to arrive. Also I need to get to bed earlier as we leave Sunday morning at 5 am. Yes, I said we leave at 5 am. Insane! So that means I need to get up Sunday when I usually go to bed. I hope I can do it!