Thankfully, all of the weather prediction services were more-or-less right about the end of last week’s heatwave. Unfortunately, as I mused at the time, the official end of the heatwave took only it’s obscenely high temperatures. The otherwise toasty high temperatures and still kinda high low temperatures have stuck around, always overshooting the day-to-day forecasts so that every single day winds up hotter, more humid, and much less comfortable than expected. It has made occupying space in my apartment a bit more tricky than usual because even something as innocuous as making dinner can put a lot of heat in my apartment that my AC unit just can’t handle on top of the day-to-day heat of summer and sunshine. I don’t remember my AC unit struggling this much in the past, but it’s certainly possible that it is genuinely working less well now than it used to. I’ve had old AC units die on me in apartments before and I know that the more heavily they’re used, the faster they wear out and the layout of my current apartment demands heavy use if I’m going to actually control the temperature in any space other than right next to my AC unit. All of which amounts to me starting to sweat most days when I’m in my office, playing games on my computer. Maybe I should spend less time in my office where there’s no good airflow and two large heat generators in a small space (me and my computer), but it’s difficult to imagine that my upstairs room where all my entertainment stuff is located will be much better when I can feel the heat swamp me every time I move around that room.

It also doesn’t help that one of the medications I’m taken is notorious for making people sweat more, that my genetics predispose me to sweating, and that everywhere I go other than my apartment is much warmer than I’m prefer my environment to be. I’m writing this during a break at my workplace and I’m sweating from just standing at my desk and typing because the ambient temperature is too high (I’m pretty sure the AC is busted or something because it normally isn’t this warm). Every time I start to get warm, I can feel myself break out in a sweat and all it really takes to feel warm at home is for me to do some chores around my apartment at the end of the day (when my AC unit is finally starting to cool things down rather than fighting a losing battle against the slowly rising ambient temperature). I am struggling to get comfortable this summer almost as much as I was struggling last summer, but at least last year my AC unit seemed to work better at keeping my apartment cool. Or it was less warm out constantly or something. I really should look into if last summer was as warm as I remember it or if the warmth I felt as a side-effect of the medication I was on made a relatively cool summer just feel uncomfortably warm.

Regardless, right now I’m struggling to stay cool and comfortable. Given how little energy I’ve got most nights these days, I’ve been leaning on a lot of simple oven dinners (baking some sausages, a frozen pizza, chicken, etc) to help me on the nights I just don’t have the energy to deal with cooking and kitchen mess. That’s not exactly feasible most nights now as just running the oven long enough to bake a quick frozen pizza heated my apartment up enough that I was just casually sweating in my office after taking it out of the oven. The heat adds up quickly and, since the oven slowly cools by shedding heat into my apartment once I turn it off, it doesn’t go down quickly. Not that venting the heat outside would help much either as that would just let the outside heat in as well… Anywaym I’m trying to swap to stuff I can do on the stovetop since there’s a lot less ambient heat from that, but there’s little that’s as simple to cook on the stovetop as it is to cook in the oven. It would probably be better for me in the long run to make stovetop food, beyond just keeping my apartment cooler, but it’s difficult to focus on that when the amount of energy I’ve got most nights is “take a quick shower to wash off the dy’s sweat while a frozen pizza or some bratwurst cooks in the oven.”

As much as I enjoy the sunshine and warmth of summer, I can’t wait for things to start cooling down again. My preferred temperature is in the sixties, so I’m looking forward to that temperature coming back in autumn, especially since we didn’t really get a lot of that this past spring. Things got too warm too quickly, dropped back into cold temperatures, hit a sort of late-spring warmth for a couple weeks, and then blasted into awful-heat-wave territory. Heck, we aren’t even really getting a lot of rain outside of heavy storms to cool things down, so it’s either broiling or pouring. No gentle rains, no quiet, cool, windy days meant for sitting on porches or in the shade… It’s just scorching, humid, or pouring. Or all of them at the same time! It’s really unfortunate. I used to really love summer, even when I wasn’t a student (and, you know, didn’t have a summer break anymore), but I also had access to the family cabin and summer getaways with family to help beat the heat during the worst days of the summer, so it was a lot easier to put up with the uncomfortable days since I knew I’d be able to enjoy the warmth when I was near a lake I could go swimming in to cool down if it ever got too hot. Now… Now I just stay inside and go out when it’s not too miserable or I can’t stand to be in my apartment any longer. My, how life has changed in the last decade.