It’s Hot – And I Hate It!

Summer is here. Well, maybe not actually here. It is actually here on either the 21st or 22nd of June. But I have always believed that we are close enough on June 1, so Summer it is. And while there is much to love about summer, there is one thing I most definitely do not love – the heat.

I live in central Indiana. We see temperatures that run the entire spectrum. Our thermometers will dip below zero (F) on the coldest of days and top 100 (F) on the hottest. If there is one thing that is a constant where I live it is that people hate, hate, hate winter. They hate the snow, but they hate the cold even more. Well, if those of you who come here to check in on me regularly know anything about your humble author, it is that I am a contrarian.

Like most people, I enjoy the mild weather of the fall and the spring. Give me a series of days that top out in the range of 60 to 65 degrees (F) and I am one happy clam. However, in climate (as in all things), you can’t always get what you want, as the Rolling Stones recognized all those years ago. And when those mild temps are not on the menu, most people prefer temps that are warmer rather than cooler.

I am just going to come out and say it – I would rather live my entire life with outside temperatures under 20 degrees (-6 to you Celsius people) than to live with those temperatures over 90 (which is 32 for those with that compressed thermometer). And yes, people have told me that I am weird.

Why you ask? It is my belief that throughout human history, it has been easier to warm up than to cool down. Fire to warm the air is relatively cheap and simple compared to air conditioning systems that are necessary to cool it. Likewise, it is easy to pile on the blankets to get comfy and snuggled in on a winter’s night. But what do you do to sleep when it is too hot? Exactly!

Perhaps my bias comes from the year or so I lived without a/c in my first adult apartment. I can still remember those mornings when I would wake up to warm air almost saturated with humidity. On those days I would be perspiring almost immediately after showering and dressing for the day. I spent *a lot* of time at the office that year, before I finally broke down and bought a window air conditioner for my apartment.

Another factor is that my favorite activities are indoors. Reading, watching movies on television and even home projects like painting or such are things that are easily done indoors. And we sometimes get the urge to cook or bake something, and there is nothing more miserable than trying to keep the house cool when the kitchen is home to a big simmering kettle of chili or an oven baking some treat.

If it gets a mite cold in the house, it is an easy matter to pull on a sweater or sweatshirt. Which works well for my physique, which favors bulky clothing. Or should I say that bulky clothing favors my physique? But when it is too warm in the house, you can only peel off so many layers before it becomes socially unacceptable. True, there are iced drinks that help one to cool down, but cold weather is a great excuse for hot drinks to warm you up.

So there, I have confessed it all. I love cold weather and pretty much everything that goes along with it. But that is not the season we are entering. I guess there is nothing to but accept it. And consume liberal quantities of ice cream.

45 thoughts on “It’s Hot – And I Hate It!”

  1. A fun post. I’m not a fan of hot weather either. 75 is pushing it, get to 80 and I’m miserable. While some of my friends are in heaven, they LOVE hot weather. RIGHT NOW, we are dealing with bad air quality from the Canadian fires. Not good. I was wondering why my eyes kept stinging yesterday, and my throat was hurting. Turned on the news and saw why. Nothing to do about it, but hope it doesn’t last long.

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  2. There are advantages each way, but warm weather always wins out. Being hot is just being hot – there are ways to remedy that. Cold seeps clear through to the bone and when it is cold one is generally more aware of how the cold seeps through every compromised crevice in their house. Nobody has ever complained about a warm breeze coming through a closed window or door.

    That said, as I get older I am less tolerant of hot days. Don’t get me wrong; I still love a 90 degree day but temperatures above that work me over easier than they once did. Long ago I remember waxing my father’s ’84 F-150 on a 95+ degree day and the weather was joyous. Now, if I were to do that, I would wait until evening or do so early morning to avoid prime heat.

    But cold? Not my cup of tea.

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    • I am pretty sure that people like you outnumber people like me by a lot. I don’t even like going out to the mailbox when it’s 95!

      My biggest challenge is at work – my truck is air conditioned and so is the warehouse where I spend most of my indoor time. But when I am in the truck stopped somewhere getting loaded or unloaded, we are under orders to avoid idling. Something silly about not wanting to have dozens of drivers sitting around burning fuel to keep cool. It’s funny how they don’t gripe about that for using heaters in cold weather. And in cold weather, the sun is your friend. Not so in the summmertime!

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    • You are outnumbered by one more, J P, and I wholeheartedly agree with Jason’s comment about tolerance as you age. We moved from Colorado to South Carolina after thirty years – and for several reasons – but one of those was the cold. We’re just not as tolerant of its many presentations anymore (i.e. snow, ice, wind, blizzards) as we were thirty years ago. On the flip side, we seem to be acclimating to the hot temps of the South a little more with each passing year. Not to say we’ll ever be “comfortable” (esp. when you add in the humidity), but there are strategies to deal with it. Get things done in the morning. Wear hats, “ice collars”, and portable fans. If only the bugs would find somewhere else to live, sigh…

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  3. I couldn’t agree with you more. Cold weather doesn’t bother me in the least — in fact I love it. I also love snow, the more the better. Spring and fall are fine — I love the flowers in the spring and I love the autumn leaves — but hot summer days I could get along without just fine. Thank God for air conditioning! Whoever invented it should be made a saint.

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  4. Funny you should mention this. The fact that it’s been warm in NJ the last two days got me thinking–I’m going to look into getting central air installed. It’s expensive (maybe $15,000 to $20,000?) That’s a lot of dough. And my 1905 house is historic, with plaster walls and maybe no room for ducts? And installation will be messy and disruptive. But I’m going to consult with an expert to see what options are available.

    Does anyone else have experience getting central air installed?

    Eventually you get to a point where you say, “Why am I suffering like this when there are solutions?” As for money, well, you can’t take it with you! (Or as Jack Benny put it, “If I can’t take it with me, I’m not going!”) He went anyway.

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    • Given the age of your house, and the historical element, you may look into ductless mini-split a/c units and heat pumps. Someone with more working knowledge can certainly tell you more, but you can get a/c without the traditional ductwork.

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    • I have never had to install central air anywhere, so have no insight for you. But there has to be a way to do it in a way that respects the building. I salute you for living like it’s 1905 for as long as you have!

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  5. We’re lucky here in southcentral Pennsylvania, as days with temperatures below 20 degrees tend to be rare. We do have our share of days above 90 degrees. As I get older, I find my tolerance for really hot days has been diminishing. And I definitely prefer to sleep in a slightly chilly room, as opposed to a hot one!

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  6. I think I have found the best of the cold/hot extremes – winter in Arizona until it starts getting hot, then back to the moderate temperatures of Alberta until the winter weather kicks into high gear again! Like you, I would much prefer to dress for the cold than try to undress for the heat.

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  8. I’m in absolute agreement. 60 degrees to about 72 degrees is the way I like it. I looked at retirement in the northwest because of this, except that over the years, the weather patterns have changed and now they get fires and heat (and I can’t afford Seattle any more). I can’t take heat any more, and the years I lived in Washington D. C. were brutal! Did you know some foreign powers pay their embassy people a “hazard duty” boost because the heat is so bad? Wasn’t unusual for me to be sitting out on my tiny apartment deck, at 10pm, pitch black, 99 degrees, 100% humidity, trying to smoke a cigar in my t-shirt and gym shorts, not a breeze in the air, and the sweat just rolling down my face. B-R-U-T-A-L!

    A couple of things I’ve noticed over the years: 1. In the 60’s and 70’s, where I live now in Wisconsin, it used to be 10 degrees below zero weeks at a time; no longer happens now. It can get cold, and dip below zero a day or two, but not like that! Also, we seem to get maybe about a third less snow (keeping my fingers crossed). 2. The period between when you shut your heat off, and turn on your air conditioning, has shortened considerably! I lived for years with no air conditioning at all, not a big deal; now it gets too, too hot!

    Stephen Pellegrino: My sister and her husband own a historic, prairie style, house built in 1921, by an associate architect of Frank Lloyd Wright. No “forced air” vents, of course, radiators only. No tearing up the walls to put in venting, not enough width, also plaster walls with lath, so monkeying around with that would be an expensive nightmare. Vertical, prairie style, windows, which will not take a window air conditioner. You can get vertical window air conditioners, but you’d have to take apart the swing-out window mechanism and find a solution to seal all that, for the three months you use it. They’ve been working on this problem for 30 years, and the only thing that keeps the house intact to historic specifications, is a roll around portable room air conditioner that has a vent on a hose that vents out the window, that they can cut a little insert with. On hot days, they just stay in the master bedroom and try and work. I grew up with zero air conditioning, so it must have been cooler 60 years ago, and overhead ceiling fans did the trick!

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    • I have read that up until WWII (if not after) D.C. used to virtually shut down in the summertime. Your experience there sounds miserable!

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  9. BTW, I’m on record saying the following: “…if you’re cold, you can always put on another layer; if you’re hot, once you’re naked, there’s nothing else you can do!”

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  10. It seems like there are a lot of folks here who skew toward preferring the cold to the heat, so you’re in good company. Count me in that group as well. Even though I’ve lived in New England for most of the past 40 years (where only in more recent years does it seem that we’ve had unbearably hot summers), I grew up down South in DC, MD, VA, NC. So I’m not at all ashamed of absolutely loving central air conditioning. Even in the late 1960s, it was more or less the norm to have it down there in suburban homes. To this day, I absolutely adore a cool house on a sickly humid day.

    Now mind you, I don’t have central air in my house up here. This house was built in about 1998, and as recently as that it was rather uncommon to have central air in even a new home around here. Now, every new house has it. I still use window air conditioners which work fine, although I’m getting sick of taking them in and out of the windows twice a year. I’ve been told that I should go the mini-split route, but I’m reluctant to shell out the bucks when I have window units that work. I know……

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    • I was one of the few of my age and area who grew up in a house with central air. Northern Indiana homes built in the late 50’s did not usually have that kind of thing, but the one my parents bought when it was just a few years old had it from new – along with an electric garage door opener. I know, right? Such privilege! So maybe this is one reason I grew up acclimated to being cool rather than hot. And why my friends all wanted to come to my house when I was a kid. Their parents had almost all had their own houses fitted for central air by 1970 or so.

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    • And I would never have guessed that central air too so long to see common use in New England. The stereotypes make me ask if the people there are hardier in harsh conditions than the rest of us or if they were too thrifty to spend the money on comfort. 🙂

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      • I do think that there’s something to the stereotypes, particularly the one about thrift. This – operating at the public/taxpayer level – is why there were still new schools being built around me as recently as 10 years ago that did not have air conditioning. Yes, heat; but not air conditioning. Since school gets out in June, the reasoning went that “who needs air conditioning in June?” and thus towns…because we pay for schools (and most else) almost entirely based on decisions made by the citizens gathering in a big room arguing about it…usually wouldn’t go for something as frivolous as air conditioning. The same idea of “if we aren’t going to use it much, why pay for it?” went for homes as well.

        More recently, I think that the environment supports an argument of “needing it”. 2 days ago here we had two consecutive days of 95 degree days…in June. That’s kind of nuts. Kids must have been baking in their classrooms if they go to one of the older schools, like from the 1990s. But more likely, folks nowadays seem just more likely to want to pay for something, or build something into things, whether it’s needed or asked for. So, go try to find a new house that doesn’t have central air. Can’t do it. They just come that way.

        Just like how all cars now come with radios and air conditioning. Two things that my parents, back in the 1960s and 1970s would never buy unless they were forced to…and they weren’t always forced to.

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      • When the paunchy softness that demands air conditioning for schools (“they’re kids – they’ll be fine”) comes to New England, we’re all done for! 🙂

        I tried living with a no a/c car in the late 80s. I would never have made it to 4 years if I hadn’t dated/married someone with an a/c car we could drive in hot weather.

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  11. I agree with you about the heat JP. Fall is my favorite season, followed by Spring. I caught the bus at the end of the street to my job in Downtown Detroit for many decades, so my Winter driving skills are not great, but maybe if they were, I’d enjoy Winter more. At least in Summer I am able to walk more, but Summer brings the extreme heat, humidity, volatile weather and with climate change, there are more and more bouts of volatile weather from heat spikes. My mother used to tell me about the North American Heat Wave in July 1936 which lasted two weeks. No one had A/C then and most people had one metal fan to cool the whole family. So, mom and my grandmother slept on the porch every night, like most of the other women and children in the neighborhood. All the men in the neighborhood took their pillow and a blanket to Sunnyside Park (Toronto) every evening and slept on the boardwalk. They worked in factories during the day, so they needed some relief from the persistent heat and the breeze from Lake Ontario provided just that.

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    • I have read about that heat wave in the 30s. I think there was another couple of hot summers in 1933-34 too. That would have been tough in those days!

      Yes, winter driving can be a challenge. Too many people think their big 4WD SUVs can overcome their lack of skills.

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  12. I’d rather have it too cold than too hot too. I feel lethargic in the humidity. I think it’s because I have Laplander blood from northern Europe (my brother had one of those early DNA). I just feel better in the cold than in the heat. And the summers are hotter now, and longer. I remember as a kid maybe a few weeks in August (the dog days of summer) when the old farmhouse was too hot to sleep upstairs and the fans were whirling, but that was just a few weeks. We didn’t get window A/C’s until the mid-70’s. Nobody had them back then, or in your car, as why would you bother for such a short period. But now my A/C usually goes on in May (not this year though), and stays on until October…..summer lingers longer than it used to too. And now that the nicer weather is here, (20-22 C), all the forest fire smoke is ruining it as it’s so hazy you can’t even see the sun. And it’s only the start of forest fire season…..it’s worrisome….

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    • Maybe it’s my Irish and Norwegian parts of my DNA that make me prefer colder weather, now that you mention it.

      I grew up in one of the very few houses in my neighborhood that had been built with central air in 1959-60. But we didn’t get it in our car until 1972.

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      • My brother did one of the earliest DNA kits, way back before they could identify the exact village you were from in Ireland, and I remember it saying you either had Laplander blood from northern Europe or were of African descent. My parents didn’t get A/C in the car until mid-80’s. I remember my sister’s wedding in 1983, and the sweltering ride to the church in the old Impala on the hottest day of the summer. I’m still driving my old Honda, which is older now….19 years. I had it in for a checkup in May, and my regular mechanic said it’s good for 3-5 more years, but I really do need to look this summer, pending the outcome of the tariffs. But Honda Civics are made in Alliston Ontario, so it should be okay. But I forgot to ask him to check the A/C as it doesn’t seem to be blowing very cool…..hopefully they can just top it up or something?

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  13. Anyone that thinks that complaining about the heat is for babies: I lived and worked in Chicago for a number of years in the late 80’s, and lived through the Chicago heat wave of 1988 and 1989, in an un-air conditioned apartment! It was over 100 degrees in 1988 for over a week, hitting 104 as the highest. Over 600 people died, mostly the elderly. In 1989 it was over 95 for over a week, with temps into the 100’s for a couple of days. Many died then as well. There was a follow up heat wave in 1995, that hit in other midwestern cities as well, resulting in over 735 people dying in Chicago: many old, many that had air conditioning but couldn’t afford to turn it on (!), and many who didn’t open windows due to fear of crime! By 1990 I had been transferred to Milwaukee, and even there in 1995, it was so terrible that I and about 4 other friends pooled our money and rented a suite at a hotel to crank up the air conditioning and get some sleep for the first time in a week. I grew up in apartments and houses in Chicago and Milwaukee, none of which had air conditioning, because it just wasn’t needed, it never seemed to get all that hot until the 80’s. Air conditioning for your car was an option until well in the 90’s (at least with Toyota), and my 2005 was the first car I bought where air conditioned was the only way you could buy it!

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    • Yes, heat waves in cities are nothing to sneeze at! I sometimes wonder if the higher summer temperatures in cities in modern times aren’t due to all of the air conditioning units running. That heat being removed from the indoor air of every living and working space (and car interior) gets dumped back outside. It has to have an effect.

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      • J.P. you might be on to something there. It’s now commonly “understood” that the pave over of grasslands surrounding cities, for big box store parking lots, (as well as big box store “fill-ins” in urban areas) has resulted in far more flooding events than in the past. Milwaukee had to finance a $2.3 billion sewer and deep tunnel project (Yes, billion with a B), completed around 1994, to keep ground water run-off from overflowing the sewage system and running into Lake Michigan! Most of that traced to the “concreting” of vast areas in the urban and suburbs areas. My parents had to install sump pumps in their basement to keep the sewage out, something no one in the city ever had to do before. It wouldn’t be a leap of logic to think that all those modern residential and commercial air conditioning units pumping heat into the atmosphere, as well as sun beating down on all that concrete, wouldn’t be responsible in some way for the urban heat increase!

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  15. Hello, friend! Come sit next to me in the air conditioning and we will commiserate! I also hate summer, being hot, and all the miseries that come with it. 65 degrees is the ideal temperature but I would take winter over summer any day. Sigh.

    That said, I’m trying hard to embrace the season this year. It isn’t going great.

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  16. I certainly can understand your perspective but I am one of those people who would choose the discomfort of too much heat over the discomfort of too much cold. I have experienced both many times and it is an easy call for me. My body does not prefer “hot” in all situations. I choose mild salsa. Reactions to elements is different depending on the person!

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      • My wife does not tolerate heat well. When we lived in Wichita for six years, it always seemed ironic to me that she had to wear a sweater everywhere in the summer because the air conditioning was so cold!

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