The heat from here

It's hot. I, the victim of two former heat strokes, took a picture of the bank thermometer registering 108. Things left in my pickup melted. The air conditioning at work is broken and the furnace comes on at inopportune times, such as today, Monday. My brain ceased working while trying to get the newspaper ready to go to the printers. The repairman finally came after a week of pleading with the landlord. The repairman told him the heat pump is not fixable and will cost $7,500 to replace. Meanwhile, I am being quite even-handed in a front page political story about the mayor's race, featuring our landlord as one of the two candidates.
Mom and I have been trying to deal with living in a mobile home without a cooling system. We have fans, but they only work when there is cooler air outside. Mom is 83 and diabetic, and she crashed and burned Friday night, becoming fairly incoherent with her blood sugar measuring 58. It's hard to eat the right things when it's hot. Instead of a nice salad with homegrown tomatoes and sliced chicken breast, we had to find her more substantial fare in a hurry, a peanut butter and honey sandwich to get through the crisis.
We went on expeditions to supposedly cooler places, only to find campers with attack dogs (Government Mineral Springs), and hordes of windsurfers, kiteboarders, swimmers, kayakers, jet-skiers and other recreationists on the Stevenson waterfront.
We finally found an oasis of sorts at Home Valley Park. Although it was still quite hot and our picnic was desultory, the river as seen from below our picnic table was restorative. We watched the barges go by, drank Hansen's diet sodas with Splenda and ate low-fat ham and cheese sandwiches.
The melons and sweet corn we've found lately have been amazing. I picked the first two Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes from our planter boxes, which we nearly lost from the extreme heat. They were wonderful paired with slices of the patty pan squash my sister brought us, plus fresh basil, chives, marjoram and sage, baked in my porcelain-lined Dutch oven. I also made a shiitake and button mushroom casserole with chicken breast chunks, herbs and jasmine brown rice and wild rice. Unfortunately, although I started fairly early Sunday morning, the oven heated up the kitchen and I spent the rest of the day compensating with open windows and fans. The forecast is for slightly cooler temperatures later this week, with the risk of thunder storms in the Cascades, including our area. There are already several forest fires to the north started by lightning. I had to work in the sweltering heat of our office while writing a story about the fire danger, while thanking my lucky stars I'm not a smoke jumper.