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outside

It never fails to warm my heart when people come bounding into the office exclaiming things, Wow -- what a great day out there! or O -- it's too gorgeous out there to be in here, when all they've done is walk the fifty metres from their car. Yes, I'm sure it did look wonderful, the way the sun spread its glittering reflective rays across your windshield. Like looking at a star from a rocket ship. Or television.

This -- along with everyone's faux mania about "getting outside", which they really only do under very controlled conditions, in a completely constructed way, usually under the auspices of a social or sporting activity -- is one of the things that makes me a little crazy-cocoa-puffs about summer.

Every single morning I walk with my three year-old to daycare and then to work. If Google is to be believed, it is 3.6 kilometres. This time of year is difficult to dress for. Yesterday morning I was too warm. Today, with the sun glorious and flooding the sky, was entirely too cold, and I wished I had remembered a hat.

But at least it kept the midges to the sidewalk. Yesterday after work, trying to cross the playing fields down by the memorial arch at RMC, I looked up to see nothing but whole boiling clouds of them, like something out of a horror movie, and with no way to walk around I just had to concentrate on keeping my mouth shut and go through them, and then wash my hair when I got home (you can't brush them out; they just smear). 
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