Hell called, they want to know why Tampa is hotter than Hades.

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What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

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Jane Austen

I have been neglecting my sad little blog for too long. The past week I had the painters working inside the house everyday, some days I had no access to the computer as they were painting the study and all the furniture was piled up in the middle. Then we spent the weekend getting things around the house ready for viewings. A new week has begun, there is still so much to do and the painter was back today to fix up some things. I'm over it and the house has not even been listed yet. The agent arrives this afternoon to take photos so I had better get the washing down. No one wants to see a picture of my nanna grundies when they peruse house pictures online. It's not so much like an episode of 'Cribs' around here, as it is a version of 'Lifestyles of the dull and unknown'.

I have spent so much time, 'de-cluttering' the house over the past couple of weeks. Boxes and boxes have been filled and taken down to the storage unit we hired for the this purpose, there is still so much more to do. The Colonel is what I would call a clutterbug. It seems that most of the military types are. We have a whole room dedicated to storing army stuff. He also is a born horder, collecting a vast array of bibelots from his travels around the world and even from his childhood. I found an old rock which I was about to throw away until he said it was actually a part of the Berlin Wall that he had acquired while serving in Germany.

The temperature here in Florida is unimaginably hot. Just walking outside and sitting on the deck makes one start to sweat. Having to do anywork outside the house is unbearable and can be fatal. People drop dead all over the place in this humidity when they go outside and start potting around. I saw on television yesterday a chart showing that heat is more likely to kill people than other weather conditions. They showed a graph which demonstrated a ten year average of death rates from weather related conditions. These included hurricanes, tornados, floods and heat. Now in America hundreds of people die each year from hurricanes and tornados. Thousands died after Katrina. Despite this staggering and very sad fact, more people died in the past 10 years from HOT weather. I have long whined and complained about the heat, much to the annoyance of the Florida locals, but here I have proved my point, this heat is downright dangerous as well as oppressive.

www.wrh.noaa.gov/psr/general/safety/heat/

We have a plague of little tiny frogs at the moment. Often green tree frogs are around so I thought the little baby froglings were tree frogs. Yesterday I tipped a bucket of ice onto the garden and these little frogs were hopping on the ice cubes and getting stuck. I was distrought, and was carefully picking up the cubes and picking off the little frogs that were stuck and feeling very happy about saving them.

My neighbour came over and told me that these darling little froglings were in fact, baby cane toads. Crikey! They are everywhere, hopping all over the place. No problem now, but these things will grow up to be vile, ugly cane toads. I stood outside, without a hat or sunblock, (horror), saving baby cane toads. Oh Flori-duh, the heat has well and truly addled my brains. I guess that accounts for such a drab blog post as well as the cane toad mercy mission. :(