Hot

Mostly just whining and links, I'm afraid

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash

Our house, in the way of houses that are over 100 years old, doesn’t have central air conditioning. We live in Minnesota, which means this is mostly fine, most of the time. We can often make it until into May before installing the three window AC units that are tasked with cooling off our 1400 square feet. This also mostly works, most of the time.

Things* start to fall apart a bit when the temperatures hit the 90s and get stuck there for days on end.

(*me, my patience, my desire to have anyone sit too close to me, my willingness to eat anything other than cold Costco chicken salad for dinner, my ability to remember that we’ll get snow again eventually, etc)

It has just been too damn hot here, with a bonus of moments of dangerously bad air quality because there is a fire up north, burning away some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen.

I’m sweaty.

I’m too hot but refuse to crank the AC up to the max because this has already been a month with $5000 in unexpected expenses (isn’t being an adult fun??) and I already know our electric bill next month is gonna hurt my feelings.

I’m crabby. And I know I’m crabby and I don’t like feeling crabby (I’m predisposed to agreeability, for good and for ill) but I can’t quite shake it off (though I can fake it tolerably well).

I’m perimenopausal so I am, in fact, taking this heat dome bullshit as a personal attack.

I currently have about 37 different projects/tasks/goals/to do list items that are at 73% done and I can’t seem to get myself to finish any of them. This is probably not the heat’s fault but my current condition of sweaty crabbiness surely doesn’t help.

I do not want to work out and so I don’t. But I feel guilty about it because I’m less than a month out until my summer tri and future me is already annoyed with current me for being lazy.

It’s allegedly going to rain tomorrow and it’s perhaps a little concerning how much of my current ability to feel optimism is tied to that little rain cloud icon on my weather app.

I’d cross my fingers but that would probably just make them sweaty.

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Here are some things I wanted to share this week:

• The announcement of the new foods list for the Minnesota State Fair is always exciting (we take the Fair VERY SERIOUSLY here). A lot of people are talking about the pickle pie but I’m more curious about the flight of pork sausages in puff pastry or the cheese curd lumpia

• On the other end of the food spectrum: here’s what it takes to feed a Tour de France rider the 8000+ calories they need a day

• As a regular audiobook listener, I enjoyed the “How an Audiobook Gets Made” that featured one of the best book narrators, Julia Whelan. I appreciated their take on AI in audiobooks and their transparency on the economics of how narrators get paid.

• This is mesmerizing to watch. She is so graceful but you know her legs are strong AF

• I’m curious how many potential buyers there could possibly be for an almost $10 million dollar house in Oklahoma that features a full baseball field and some aggressive wallpaper choices? Fun fact: the house is owned by a former MLB player who has two sons who also play professional baseball, so apparently that field was useful!

• A poem that feels apt at the moment

• Sports betting is a scourge and I truly hope we’ll figure out how to meaningfully regulate it before an entire generation of young males (mostly) lose everything

• Some YMCA camps (including one our family has been to in the past) had to evacuate due to wildfires burning up north. This story about the effort to save a fleet of historic wooden canoes was unexpectedly moving. I hope they and the camp all make it through, it’s a pretty magical place.

  

• These very comfy, very lightweight Skimmies are CLUTCH for wearing under dresses and skirts in the summer. I’ve posted them as a suggestion before but they are also currently on-sale at Costco, so I gotta post them again.