not on good terms with my digestion

I am really tired of my digestive system not working properly. I was horribly sick with what felt like food poisoning all last week (only food poisoning doesn't usually last that long). Not eating anything is not a sensible long-term solution. It did seem like a good idea for a few days when even a glass of cold water would set off fresh spasms.

I resent that so many comfort foods I remember from my childhood are now things I can't eat because they have dairy. I wouldn't have macaroni and cheese, or creamed spinach, or hot chocolate, when I was sick with a stomach virus (I don't think so, anyhow). But part of my memory of being sick as a little kid is my father making me tea and toast with pepperidge farm white bread, and cutting the toast with a cookie cutter. So of course I looked for that kind of bread when I went to the store, and it has milk in it. It probably always did, I just didn't care, before. At least saltines are safe.

After being sick for a week and a half, I finally reached a point where I felt ok eating bananas, or plain rice, or putting soymilk in mint tea. I even ate an egg, successfully! I was thinking in terms of food poisoning, so I boiled it for 25 minutes, and it had a kind of rubbery toughness to it. I don't know what it means anymore to make easily digestible food when I'm not well.
Then yesterday, I felt well enough to walk down to the farmers' market in the sunshine. I bought baby beets, and summer squash, and cucumbers, and a cookie. I ate the cookie and some of the squash, and it was a complete disaster. I'm right back to feeling as bad as I did 4 days ago.

heat

Here it is near the end of July, and I am pleasantly surprised not to have needed the air conditioning in my apartment yet this year. Part of that may be relatively mild weather, compared to the previous 3 years I've lived here. But the really remarkable thing is that my apartment on the 6th floor is not routinely 20-30 degrees F hotter than the outside of the building at ground level. 85F is so much more livable than 110 it's ridiculous, even with the same air movement and humidity.

Why is this summer different than previous years? I have better curtains, and that probably helps. I don't mean better curtains from an interior-decorating perspective. There's no valance, and they don't come to the floor, and there's no gauzy stuff across the middle to let all the heat in. I just folded a flannel sheet in half and hung it over the curtain rod. It blocks MUCH more light than the vertical blinds that came with the apartment. And there's no problem opening the window! Unlike blinds, a curtain can be blown about without rattling, and without being torn loose. And one can open a curtain without moving it directly in front of where the window opens.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything I'm doing. Maybe my neighbors downstairs are doing something differently. It seems unlikely that someone would have their heat on in the summer, but they might have been trying to incubate a dragon or something. (Not that I've seen one.) Or they might have baked a lot. Or maybe they were using their air conditioning to dump hot air outside, and the hot air was rising to my apartment. There are 4 apartments under me, and some of them have new tenants.