I HATE summer. In particular, that stretch of ungodly hot, dry and sunny weather between about late June and mid-September we get every summer here in the Dallas area. No rain, brutal unrelenting sunlight, and oppressive heat for something like 80 days every year.
If you’re going to spend any significant amount of time outside, you have to guzzle water like a fiend, slather yourself in sunscreen, and spray yourself down in insect repellent about once every couple of hours, and hope that your incessant sweating doesn’t wash it off or that you don’t wipe it off getting sweat out of your eyes.
Car and home air conditioners can struggle, and temps can go from the usual 97-100 up as high as 112 sometimes. A few years back in 2011, we had 70 some-odd days over 100 degrees, and 40 of those were consecutive between Jul 2 and Aug 10, and another 20 consecutive days between Aug 15 and Sep 3.
I find myself desperately wishing for snow and ice and winter weather, but never have found myself wishing for the reverse.
I’ve endured probably 20 of those summers in Dallas, plus another 20 in other parts of Texas and yeah, they’re always freaking brutal.
Yesterday with a THI over 105 I was moving 500 lb landscape boulders and digging away grass around them to put a bed in my yard. Sweaty doesn’t begin to describe it. On the advice of a doctor (No, me) I then set a large pitcher of sangria and margaritas at pool edge and got very, very brown.
Snakes, ticks, sunburn, mosquitoes, miserable heat, dangerous storms, children everywhere, overgrown lawns, tourists, reruns, dull superhero movies, high electric bills, flies, traffic, covering at work when half the staff is on vacation, hot cars, bland seedless watermelon, haze, poison ivy, etc etc
Preach it. An old friend of mine used to comment that he’d never had to shovel heat off his driveway, but the flip side is that you can’t move it out of your way.
I spent all day Saturday outdoors, engaging in moderate to heavy exertion (from carrying props and gear to fighting). It was all I could do to keep myself and my friends out of heat exhaustion–lots of water, ice water spray bottles, and cloths soaked in ice water. There was no keeping up with it; you could drink until you sloshed and were in danger of puking, and you’d still get dehydrated. At the end of the day, when I finally cooled down and my shirt started drying, large sections of it turned into rigid, salt-caked plates.
I’m with you. I was born and raised in southern California and never knew that I detested it until I moved further north. It’s still too hot for me here in southern Silicon Valley. I hate slathering on sunscreen and I hate air conditioning and I hate hot cement and hot asphalt parking lots.
I hope to move to the PNW when I retire and revel in cool rainy and even snowy weather for the rest of my life.
When I lived in Florida, I had heavy, velvet curtains on my windows, no matter the season, because they helped keep out light and heat. My mother said it was like living with a vampire.
I also had reverse SAD, because I was so miserable in the hot, humid summer. My asthma would run amok because the air was so thick (and sometimes the pollution got bad), and the high humidity plus heat caused a constant sinus headache PLUS a constant migraine.
Unless I was physically on the beach or in a pool (or the shower), I was sweating. (I love the beach and pools. But I hate it being summer otherwise.)
I’m surprised I lived there for 30 years before it occurred to me to move away.
What I get in the Boston area isn’t nearly as bad as what I got in Florida. Oh, there are days, but even when there was a stretch of 100F temps a few years back, I was ok. And that was because I knew that it won’t be an unrelieved stretch of > 90F temperatures with matching humidity until freakin’ November!
Don’t get me wrong, the Arizona desert is truly beautiful and the monsoon is fun to watch, but here at Casa [del]Ko[/del] Packrat we spend more time patrolling the yard for rattlesnakes before letting the dogs out and scooping scorpions out of the kitchen sink than appreciating the sunsets and blooming saguaros. If all goes according to plan, look for me in the February ‘Rain In Seattle’ pit thread.
Why are you living in Texas in the first place? I live in NJ and that’s bad enough. But at least we get rain in the summer and one hundred degree days are very, very rare.
We just had our first significant rainfall in at least two months. The past 30 days has been in the 90s by mid-afternoon. Still, not the shithole that most of Texas seems to be.
This pitting is full of truth; preach it, brother. I’m so sick of people acting like I’m a freak for hating summer. The same people who freaked out about how “cold” it was last week when we had a glorious 70 degree day. The freak is not me, summer lovers.
I grew up in Houston, and then lived most of my young adulthood in Austin. I freakin’ *hated *the summers there. Houston was particularly bad- it’s so humid that you’re just being *steamed *for six months out of the year.
I now live in Salt Lake City, with the actual winters and everything. Yes, it gets really damned hot here… but for the first time in my life, sweating accomplishes what it’s supposed to do. I still try to avoid doing anything in the heat, but at least all I have to do is get into shade to cool down- shade in Texas is just a darker form of heat.
I’ll gladly take shoveling snow over heat exhaustion, any day.
Another North Texan checking in. Yep, it’s getting pretty awful out there. (Though I suppose this year is not as bad, comparatively, as past years.) We’re due for our first proper 100+ degree day today or very soon, at any rate. And it always seems like it’s a furnace that gets switched on–it just keeps on cranking out the heat, until September or even October. Day after day of baking, relentless heat.
My flowers are wilting by early afternoon most days, and need to be watered twice a day now.
Really. How can anyone hate summer? Summer is long, lazy days, fresh veggies, fireflies, camping and cookouts. If we could just get rid of the tourists who descend upon our lake, it would be perfect.
It’s hot here in Southern California too. We’re going to have to endure 80 to 83 degree weather for the next 10 days, with partly cloudy skies and that pesky breeze that keeps blowing off the ocean.
Fellow summer hater here. I’ve lived in the southeast all my life and have never gotten used to the humidity. I break out in a sweat even thinking about it. The only thing I like about summer is that my favorite season Fall is coming.
