Tag: Summer

  • Air Conditioners

    It’s going to be 80 degrees in NYC today, and then 87 tomorrow. In other words, we are going to die from this heat. May, normally, is one of the two best months to be in New York – the other being September. May around here is pleasant, a little cool, and little warm, everything is blooming, and green. The City feels alive, reborn, and full of life. And rarely does the temperature get above 78. Anything in the 80’s is Summer Weather – which should be the sticky and awful July and August.

    But the world is warming, and the Summer Heat Creep has begun, or more accurately, started a few years ago. The Summer heat and humidity in New York is now June through August. Sometimes it starts in late May, and can linger into mid September. I find it a tad bit sad that the Summers of old are gone, and never to come back; hot in the day, cool at night.

    With the coming short heat wave, I have tasked myself with going to our storage space to recover our air conditioners. We are the people who remove our window units in Fall, only to bring them back in late Spring. Like changing out your wardrobe, or full house cleaning, the dance of the air conditioners is another seasonly ritual we partake in. We do this so we can have a clear view out our apartment’s windows of a cinderblock wall, and a construction site. Breathtaking vistas, to say the least.

    In the end, the gathering of the air conditioners is yet another sign that the year is continuing to move on. After the a/c’s are installed, soon school will be out, and vacations and camps begin. Only to lead to road trips, and attempts to escape the heat.

    How long until Fall?

  • Hot in the City

    It was warm yesterday, but today it’s going to be hot in NYC. Like Summer hot. Early July hot. And we don’t have our A/C’s.

    Like reasonable people, who keep fooling themselves into thinking that the weather patterns of the past will continue into the future, we took all of our air conditioners out of our apartment at the end of September. You know, at the beginning of Fall, when everything starts to cool down. Normally, we don’t go and get the A/C’s out of storage until late May, and even sometimes into June. We should have just kept them in the widows, and suffered through our amazingly mild winter.

    Currently, we are in a three-day heatwave. Technically you can only call it a heat wave if the temp is above 90 degrees for three days in a row. But being that it was 85 yesterday, t will be 90 today, and then 88 on Friday, I think it is fair to say that it’s a heat wave. I mean, on Sunday the high was 55. I had a sweater on for god sakes. I was drinking coffee to stay warm at an Easter Egg Hunt with my kid.

    Now, I’m sitting by my window, in shorts and a shirt, praying that a breeze will come through, but it won’t because the new construction behind our building is killing the cross wind, and I think we are all going to die tonight.

    The only winner here is the kid because she’s going to get ice cream, pretty much all day, because nothing is better than ice cream on a hot day.

  • The Dance of the Air Conditioners

    When God? When Lord, will we be able to take our air conditioners out of our apartment?

    This is the prayer I say around this time of year. Fall is so tantalizingly close, but still we need our air conditioners. I just want these clunky, environment destroying, comfortability creating machines out of our home! They run up our electricity bill, make the apartment feel unnaturally cool, and block the use of widows.

    Like most people up here in the Northeast, we have a home that doesn’t contain central air conditioning. We have a window unit in the kid’s room, and a stand-alone unit that takes up an awkward position in the living room, like a house guest that won’t leave. Though our apartment is great in winter, as it retains heat very well, this place is an oven in the Summer. No matter how we try to vent and fan this place, the air in here remains warm, and never leaves. In fact, we have a dead zone at the dining table where it will continually stays two to five degrees warmer than the rest of the place.

    Usually around Memorial Day or the first week in June, we head out to storage and pick up our two a/c units. We play the game of, “Will Dad Throw Out His Back,” sometimes accompanied with the question, “Is That a Hernia?” The wife does help me as we do have to carry these units up two flights of stairs. It is a chore no one wants to do, but we know we have to do it to survive the Summer.

    In fact, the wife did her first Summer in the apartment with no a/c. This is before I showed up, so I didn’t experience it, but oh the stories that woman can tell of the heat. Never again will this apartment not have a/c in the Summer, she swore!

    Then around this time of year, mid to late September, after the weather has settled to an average daily high in the mid 70’s, we do the dance again, back to storage with the units. Going down the stairs with heavy objects is much easier and fun. It sort of is like the first activity of Fall for us; next comes apple picking and pumpkin carving.

    The lead up to removing the a/c’s this year has been rather excruciating. See, at the end of August, we took a vacation up to northern Maine, staying in a cabin on the side of a mountain. It was pretty there, as I am sure you can imagine, but what was the most thrilling for us old people was that we had the windows open, day and night, with the breeze coming in. You had to put a sweater on at night. That’s right! A sweater in August, which is a thrill for a guy who grew up in Texas, and the word August is synonymous with 100-degree heat. So, what I am looking forward to is opening up windows and putting on a sweater.

    As I sit here on my couch, with the a/c blowing, I am writing this post while waiting on a cool front to come through. Hopefully, by the end of today, we will have windows open. The sweater might still be a reach, but here’s to hoping.

    (Hey! I see you there. Look, I need a favor. I can’t pay off my bookies until this blog thing starts generating some cash for me. Okay, so what I need you to do is to like this post, or comment on it, or even share it with people you know. Anything to get that algorithm working in my favor. I can get you back on this. Promise.)

  • It’s Labor Day

    I feel like I have achieved some sort of accomplishment for making it to Labor Day. Then I’m reminded of the Chris Rock joke, that you can’t be proud of something that you’re supposed to do. Like make it to Labor Day, or not go to jail.

    So, in my achievement/not achievement morning that I am having with my wife on the couch as we watch “The Price is Right,” I am thinking about how we got to the end of June, and I thought that this Summer would never get started or end for that matter. Yet here we are. The wife goes back to work tomorrow, and the kid is in school by Thursday.

    For me, I have to start looking for a job. Or at least, I have to start exploring ways to bring money in to help out the family. Won’t lie, I’m not looking forward to it. Part of it is that I have been out of work for so long, I have a little anxiety about returning. Also, I have this nagging feeling that I have started entering the realm of being just a little too old for certain jobs. And then there is what set of skills do I have? What I can do really only applies to theatre and non-profit arts groups.

    I talked about this with the wife last night, and we are in agreement that though another income stream would help the family, there is no rush for me to go out and take the first job that comes my way. I can take my time and find the right fit. That does help me relax a little.

    But, alas, for today is the end of Summer in our house. We most likely will do nothing but watch TV, and let the kid do what ever she wants. We will give ourselves one final day to relax.

  • Thinking of Autumn and Climate Change

    I put pants on today. Since the last week in June until yesterday, I have been in shorts. It is Summer after all, so that should not come as a shock to anyone. But the fact that I put on a pair of khaki pants, and it is a little humid today so it might not have been the wisest decision, to me marks the start of Fall. That’s right, I am calling it: Today starts the slow and steady decent into the Autumn Season.

    Not too long ago, I made the declaration that I am over Summer. The heat, humidity, and the constant A/C being on, wore me down. I was, and still am, ready for the seasons to change. Today, I took an active step in acclimating myself to this coming Autumn.

    Yet, I don’t think any of us have been able to escape the constant and unrelenting news reports that this Summer was the hottest, and depending on where you lived, either the driest or wettest on record. Once in a 1,000-year droughts, or once in 1,000-year floods keep happening. The heat will only get worse. Meaning that Summers will get longer, making the other seasons shorter. Even talking to my father this weekend, and he isn’t the biggest believer of climate change, he has started to express worry and concern for the future.

    There are many things that I dislike about humanity, and sadly, I think most people are like my father. They didn’t believe climate change would happen, until it happened. I remember being in grade school, so that is the mid-80’s, and every school year we had an Earth Week, where we were taught about cleaning up and throwing away garbage, being respectful of nature, because if the planet started falling apart due to how we treated it, then we are all screwed. And I grew up in Texas, so I know I got the most conservative version of that message.

    Now at least, it seems like everyone is coming around to the truth. That at least makes me hopeful for the future, and for my daughter’s generation. I know two things to be true. One is that humans are great at adapting and overcoming life threating problems. We’ve been doing it for 100,000 years. The second goes back to what I said before, people only believe in something if they experience it first-hand. To me, that’s says that humanity is primed to solve this problem.

    I’m trying to stay optimistic, and keep the faith in all of us working together. I sure hope that’s not misplaced. In the meantime, I will start to think about taking the sweaters out of winter storage.

    (And on that happy note, If you like what you read, be a champ and give a like, or a share, or hell, even leave a comment. Does a body good!)