After what has turned into three horrible, sweaty days, the heat wave is ending. It has not ended yet, but the wisdom of the remaining pieces of the US national weather prediction aparatus have declared that, by the time I’ve gotten my necessary groceries and made my way home, it will be over. My two sleepless, restless nights will not be joined by a third and the ruddy, glistening sheen of sweat I’ve taken to wearing in the place of my normal mistless pallor will finally take its leave. Even now, as I type this, all my weather apps and services cry out that the worst has passed. “All will be well,” they say, “With a fifty percent chance of severe thunderstorms and a constant overnight temperature not much lower than last night’s.” My office is muggy, made so by the water I’m constantly drinking to feed the stirring air that whicks all perspiration from my skin to compliment the moisture that made making its way through the heavy filters and cooling processes of the building’s HVAC system that leaves this place a dry husk devoid of comfort in the winter and my little thermometer’s delcaration that it is only seventy-six degrees in my litle rectangle does little to comfort me as a result. After all, what does the number mean to me when the only way for me to stop sweating is to sit in my chair and refrain from any kind of movement? What’s the point of knowing the temperature when even the movement of standing up to examine the digital readout is enough to pop tiny beads of just-drunk water on my forehead, upper lip, and forearms? It is hot, it cannot be denied, and I do not need a thermometer to tell me that.
Continue readingWeather
Doing My Best To Cope With The Lastest North Midwestern Weather Trend: Wildfire Smoke!
Wildfire season is back once again and my days of enjoying the fresh spring air are over. As are, thankfully, my days of sweating at night because it’s too warm for me to sleep comfortably on my memory foam mattress but not warm enough to turn on the AC. I mean, hell, with the arrival of the warmer days, the winds have shifted and sometimes even a massive cold front that brings the outside temperature down into the 40s doesn’t have enough wind blowing in the right ways to cool my apartent down (my bedroom was in the low seventies, nearly thirty degrees above the outside ambient temperature, and it was miserable). But those days are over now because it’s finally warm enough to turn the AC on and the sudden arrival of wildfire smoke means I peobably shouldn’t be sleeping with my windows open anyway. Gotta let the air filter through my AC unit first, to clean up some of the smoke. Or so I’d say if my AC unit actually had a proper filter and not a tightly-woven wire-mesh “filter” that clogs instantly and yet never actually cleans the air of anything but the largest particles (of which there is an endless supply thanks to my neighborhood trees and my pet bird). Instead of relying on that for another smokey summer, I’ve bought myself four hundred dollars of air purifiers (they were MASSIVELY on sale, so this would have easily been 600-700 bucks worth of air purifiers any other time) and spread them around my apartment.
Continue readingThe First Casualty Of The Summer Heat
Somehow, despite the temperature hitting the upper 70s (or 26ish for you Celcius folks), my employer hasn’t turned on the air conditioning yet. In fact, given how warm and stuffy my office is, the heat might still be on. The temperature gauge outside my office says it is 75 in the lab, but I can feel the temperature drop a couple degrees the instant I exit my office door, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my office itself is 80 or higher. I mean, I can’t even stand around my desk without sweating a little bit, despite having a desk fan running on high (which doesn’t count for as much as I’d like it to since I need that thing running constantly just to counter how still and stuffy my office gets without it). Honestly, it’s so warm in here that I’m having a difficult time not falling asleep immediately any time I sit down in my chair or when my attention starts to drift while standing at my desk (have you ever dozed off while standing up? It’s quite startling but apparently not so startling that I won’t do it again within five minutes). It’s almost unbearable and the only thing keeping me from leaving the office to work at home is that my apartment won’t be much better (though the air will be moving a bit more than it is here, which isn’t nothing). And, you know, the fact that I’m sure it’d become a thing with my coworkers.
Continue readingSpring Weather, Sleep Schedules, And Catching Sick
It is officially spring. At least it is when I’m writing this. Who knows when you’re reading this (but chances are good that it is also spring, given how infrequently old posts of mine resurface). It is the first of Spring today and the weather has stopped its mad fluctuations for at least a little bit. Next week holds the promise of some wild swings between freezing weather and the seventies, so who know what kind of day you’ll be reading this on, but the days before it will be proper, early-Spring days and most of the days after it will be proper early-spring days, so I’m looking forward to having at least a little stability in the weather for a while. After all, things have been jumping up and down (in both temperature and air pressure), that I’ve been decidedly under the weather for a while now. It’s usually not that bad, unless it’s jumping forty degrees in a single day, but I’ve been in a rough place for a while now, due to burnout and exhaustion, so even a little bit takes a toll on me. Still, thanks to feeling buoyed by sunlight, how late sunset is these days, and generally uplifted by the warm weather, I managed to push through it. Then I got a stomach bug, got laid out for two days dealing with that, and then everything came crashing down on me, keeping me laid out for another three days. It was rough, but I’m coming out the other side of it feeling better than I have in a while.
Continue readingSick Of (And From) This Weather
As often happens, when the temperatures rise and fall pretty rapidly from one day to another, I’ve gotten sick. It definitely doesn’t help that I’m super burned out and exhausted from the pains of last year combined with the project I’ve been doing for so long at work that I’ve forgotten what it is like to not be constantly thinking about it. All it takes these days is a tiny disruption and I am down for the count, especially now as I’m trying a new medication and tiredness/low-energy seems to be one of the common side-effects that I’m trying to cope with. Which means I’m working from home today (the day I’m writing this) and doing my level best to actually rest a bit. I’m really not sure how much more of this I can take, if I’m being quite honest. I know I’m physically reaching a breaking point, but I’ve got maybe another week or two before the project is fully done and I can just take an entire week off from work to sleep, rest, do nothing, and try to start undoing the damage all this constant stress and burnout has done…
Continue readingA Poor Excuse For A Wisconsin Winter
Today, while I was stuck inside working and writing blog posts during all of my breaks, the snow melted. It hit the mid-50s and would have been an excellent day for a walk if a few inches of snow hadn’t melted and turned the entire world into a swampy morass of goop, mud, and salty grit. You see, until just a couple weeks ago (two, as of this being posted), we hadn’t gotten much snow. There’d been several incredibly light dustings and maybe an inch or two total of accumulation over a couple snow events, but none of it stuck around long and it was never enough to really blanket the environment. Two weeks ago, we had a couple snowstorm events over a few days and accumulated a proper amount of snow, enough for it to ACTUALLY feel like a proper Wisconsin Winter. Now, today, it’s all melting and will likely completely vanish over the next few days as the temperatures rise above freezing and stay there. Sure, it’ll drop down eventually and we’ll get that Wisconsin Classic, the good old Wintery Mix of snow, rain, and sleet that turns the world to slush, but this is probably going to be it for actual snow accumulation barring some strange late-March temperature drops. A week and a half of snow. Maybe three or four weeks of decently cold temperatures, most of it without much snow. And then a bunch of days in the fifties, tons in the fourties, and who know how many High Temperature Records. What a terrible excuse for a winter.
Continue readingFighting Phantasmal Guilt As I Wait For My Turn In The Climate Disaster Zone
Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.
Continue readingThe Sudden Fall Of Summer Weather
After months and months of summer, fall arrived in a single week. I had my AC on not that long ago and now I have to close my windows because it’s getting too cold in my apartment. And yet we’ve got temperatures in the seventies coming up next week [or in a day or two, as this post goes up]. It has been an absolutely wild Fall, so far, and I’m reminded of that Spring from a few years ago where we went from cold, wet, and snowy to hot and humid in a week and a half in May. We had exactly one week of Spring after a very long Winter and then went straight to Summer. Sure, we’ve had more Fall than that already, and it looks like we’re going to have plenty more as the temperatures change up and down (which is usually a sign that most of the heat it coming from the sun rather than from the weather and prevailing winds), but it was a rather drastic shift to go from weather routinely in the high seventies and eighties that rarely dropped into the fifties to weather dropping below freezing and barely breaking out of the fifties for a few days at a time. It looks like, finally, a couple weeks into October, Fall is here to stay.
Continue readingStormy Thoughts The Morning After
Last night, as I settled in for what comfort I could manage while entirely without power (it was warm and humid, I wasn’t able to use any of my sound generators to cover up the noise of my neighbors, and I was entirely without access to my CPAP machine), I wound up spending a lot of time thinking. It’s difficult to avoid when you can’t fill the air with podcasts like you normally do because you need to save your phone’s battery, when your various electronic entertainments are all inaccessible, and when you’ve got no way to position a candle so that reading a book won’t strain your eyes more than your day job of staring at monitors already has. Not a lot to do other than consider spending my tablet’s battery to read or sit and think about what it means to be without power in the modern era. Which is pretty tempting, to be completely honest. I do enjoy a bit of inward contemplation and there’s nothing quite like staring out the window at the unquiet night sky as you consider modernity. As I went to do this, though, my mind already full of thoughts about an impenetrably dark sky, the darkness of a world without city lights, and the slow hum of people doing their best to live on despite the sudden darkness and silence of the world around them, I found out that this little idealized version of my situation didn’t actually exist.
Continue readingNotes From Within A Tornado Shelter
I had different plans for today’s post, but I’m currently sitting on the floor in the bathroom at work because it’s a designated tornado shelter (and the one I trust to be a bit safer than other nearby options). The tornado warning sirens have been silent for ten minutes now, but the weather report says they’ll last another forty-five minutes and there’s a good chance we’ll get a new set before these expire, given the way the storm front is moving (I turned out to be correct: we got a new warning that lasted an additional thirty minutes). Currently, the door is open as what seems like the only other employee in this part of the building is hanging out in the other bathroom doorway, the both of us scanning various radars and weather monitoring services while we talk about the likelihood of us getting hit by any of the potential tornados. Currently, the wind makes it look like they’ll all pass west and north of us, but the storm front took a pretty hefty push to the east, directly toward us, right as the sirens hit, so who knows. Know that, if you’re reading an entire post with the normal (low) number of spelling and grammar issues that I’ve survived and everything turned out some kind of fine [it did. No tornadoes even touched-down in my area. There were some hurricane-force winds, though, and I spent 24 hours without power after writing this post and eventually leaving for home between bursts of the storm].
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