1) Conquer the season and make your own lemonade with just three simple ingredients (lemon, sugar, water!)
2) Squash that swelter and join the local community pool
3) Brush off the burn with a nice cold treat at the pool’s snack shack
4) Break the ice with the snack shack attendant
5) Forget those soaring temps and avoid talking about your cooling marriage while you ask when the attendant gets off work
6) Slap on your SPF 50 and make plans to meet at a nice shady spot far away from your house
7) Douse the flames and text your spouse a crisp excuse on why you won’t be making it home for dinner (Example: ‘We’re all out of lemons for the homemade lemonade!’)
8) Bury the blaze and blast the car’s AC to chill those nerves on the long introspective drive to the motel
9) Hammer the heatwave and take a cold numbing shower after a bout of awkward sober sex with the snack shack attendant
10) What have you done?
11) Dial back that summertime sizzle by exiting the strip mall motel and clocking the wintry gaze of a woman entering the pet store
12) Thrash those tropic-blues and enjoy the nice cool chill running down your spine as you realize it’s that woman who just joined the PTA at your children’s school
13) Stave off the sweat, roll down the car windows, and let the white noise of the wind drown out your thoughts
14) Humidity? More like Humid-not-y. Stop at the store for some lemons so you can make lemonade when you get home because that’s what you said you were going to do and you are not a liar
15) Chill out and let your new mantra ‘I am not a liar’ wash over you like an island breeze
16) You’ve got it made in the shade so let your car idle a block away from your house and remember that trip you took to the beach with your family
17) Escape the scorch of the sun by parking in the garage and binge eating 15 of your son’s ice pops out of the garage fridge
18) The garage, and your brain, is too hot! Escape both by screaming ‘Who’s ready for some lemonade?!’ when you enter the home and feel the sharp chill in your bones when you scream out ‘I am not a liar!’ by mistake instead
19) Recover from the heat when your children ask ‘What?’ by coolly saying ‘I said I’d get some lemons and I got some lemons. I did not break that promise or any promise!’
20) Make like a popsicle and freeze when your partner comes around the corner and says ‘Marge said she saw you at a motel in Avondale?’
21) Swat out those soaring temps by calling up the snack shack attendant and explaining you have nowhere else to stay tonight
22) Sleep off the swelter on a couch in the basement of the snack shack attendant’s grandmother’s house
23) Be pragmatic about the heat. Sure it’s hot out, but it’s nothing compared to the hell of your own design
24) Squelch those highs and pick up some lows at the liquor store
25) Harness step one and combine the water, sugar, lemons, and booze. Shake!
26) You did it! You drank a lot of lemonade and now it’s Fall