rêveuse;

Secret sanctuaries 💧

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

Threshold - Nerrida Parfitt , 2026

Australian , b. 19

And you have your staff play with their kids while you hold them in the tiny restroom as they come completely undone because they just found out that their golden boy husband is having an affair with the someone he's been doing residency with for the past three years.

He confessed that he'd rather be with the other woman but she's of a different faith and it's more important to have kids than to be happy. And no. No he will not grant her a divorce. And he will not stop seeing the other woman - because he's a man. It's his right.

TRUE story.

Also - She was NOT THE ONLY ONE to fall to pieces in our store for similar reasons.

I loath the ideology of "tradwives". It is a false doctrine preach by Patriarchy not a divine being.

It is the nature of evil to hide this way.

Married out of college, 4 kids, he spent 15 years building up his career while she took care of the house and the kids. When he was earning $600k a year suddenly he started to pull away - she wasn't as pretty anymore, the kids were loud, the house was a mess... She wasn't good enough anymore. He got himself a flat. He got her me and my precedessors to help with the kids. No, they can't divorce, that would make him pay her money for the kids and he didn't like that. Every once in a while a bill would be unpaid. My weekly checks would bounce. We lived in a $1,5mil house around DC and our gas or water was turned off more than once.

Somehow he was always out of money.

By accident she learned from a friend of a friend that he was actually seeing a young lady lawyer for a few years now. It wasn't her, it wasn't lost interest. He was just a piece of shit.

Thankfully, she had family that took no shit and they stood behind her and borrowed her money for lawyers to force the divorce now that she had proof of him cheating. She's spent tens of thousands to get there while he was resisting every step of the way - because without divorce he wouldn't have to pay her alimony, he could just throw scraps whenever he wanted and still pretend to be a good dad.

She's spent tens of thousands and two years to free herself from this man, and when she could finally go to work (thank fuck she finished college) she was earning $25k a year.

She only managed to get away with the support of her parents and family. Through the au-pair grapevine I've known other families like that. Too many. Lady down the street tried to commit suicide when same happened to her - she was from Taiwan and had no support to get free. And people around scorned her for being "dramatic" - women who held on to their places with their fingertips talked shit about her, because their own husbands would never...! Right?

This? Is why conservatives want to take away no-fault divorce--because if some dude says no to a divorce and you don't have any (IRON-TIGHT) evidence of cheating? Then you're stuck in that situation and he doesn't have to pay a drop toward you and your kids. He can go get a flat, fuck his mistress, and you will starve with your kids until you can get some kind of proof of him cheating and a judge who likes you.

Now imagine all of this horror movie shit, AND you can't open a bank account without this piece of shit opening it with you. That was what women dealt with until about the 70s when we were finally allowed to open bank accounts with a man's signature.

That is what conservatives and fundies want to take you back to. When this shit was just the fucking norm.

There are old white guys still alive who remember who damn nice it was when a woman couldn't open a bank account without a man's signature and his dad could go live a double life with a mistress with zero repercussions and oh how they slather and drool for those times. And how they have waxed poetic about these halcyon days to their desperate daddy-issues sons now eager to please and without the social skills or emotional maturity to understand the fucked up nature of it all.

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.