Hot.
Yes. It is hot. Our summers here in the god-forsaken Great Lakes State are often hot. Or they are not so hot. They can be as cold as blue blazes. They can be dry. They can be wet! Sometimes we have to rename the season of summer to the Monsoon Season. In the best of summers, we have a few weeks of really hot weather during the high season and there are some big, beautiful thunderstorms and then life shifts on toward fall and shorter days and longer nights. And snow. And ice… But thees ees Meecheeegaaan and anything can happen.
The worst summer I remember is the summer of 1988. Mouse was 1-1/2 and Lizard was going on four. We had a period of time when the temperatures hit the lower 100s for DAYS in a row. We did not have central air in our house then. We did not have central air in our house until a few years ago. I’m not sure why we have it now since we so rarely use it. We could’ve used it THAT summer. But this gets worse. We did NOT have an air-conditioned automotive vee-hickle that year. I had never owned a vee-hickle with A/C and neither had the GG. When I was a kid, air-conditioning in the car consisted of everybody rolling their windows down and letting whatever bugs came along (and there were a lot of those in the Yoop in those days) come right into the window. Er, there were also a few times when Grandroobly flicked a cee-gar butt out the driver’s seat window and it came in through the back left passenger window. Sometimes I was sitting in that seat. Fun times.
Anyway, 1988 was an AWFUL summer. Sustained temperatures on the Planet Ann Arbor were in the 90s and low 100s and it was dry as a bone. All of the grass in the city turned brown. Probably the worst of it was the time that Mouse contracted roseola. Roseola is a minor childhood disease but it causes babies to spike high temperatures. Honest to murgatroid, there was a day when the ambient temperature in our city was 104 degrees and Mouse had a 104 degree temperature and we were actually sitting with her in a plastic KMart-style kid pool in the back yard. Note: She was basically okay at this point and raising her usual ruckus.
Somehow, we survived that summer and we have only owned one vee-hickle without a/c since then and that was The Indefatigable. Today? We reluctantly hit the southbound I75 SUV Speedway early. It wouldda been a hot drive in one of our old vee-hickles. I watched the Ninja display the outside temperature. 80. 85. 88. 90. 87… In between dealing with all the hot-rod-type drivers that insisted on passing me on the right even though I had my turn signal on to indicate that I was finished passing and trying to move back into the slow lane. I mean, I was probably going 75. If you are going 85/90, you are probably going tooo fast. But most of these folks are traveling from their vacation homes (or wherever) down to the dern Motor City. Maybe that gives them a pass on traffic laws? I dunno. I think they all got their driver’s licenses outta Crackerjack Boxes. Ahem… Anyway. It is hot here but it is typical heat for this area at this time of year and so we are surviving…
July 5th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
I don’t envy you that HOT weather–yuck. We had a session of that last summer, but seem to be much cooler this year. (in fact, too cool although it is supposed to warm up into the 70s and 80s) Wow!! 85/90 is much too fast. 70 is my max.
July 6th, 2010 at 8:50 am
i remember that summer. the glorious summer of ’88, it was known in duluth, where it was hot and sunny every day instead of cold and foggy, with periods of rain. we were young and played softball and hid the green-bottled Mickey’s wide mouths in the grass. we took a roadtrip to Summerfest in Milwaukee and slept on someone’s floor, in rows of sleeping bags. ah those were the days. now we are old and sit aorund on the computer all day….