Hot Fun in the Summertime

I can't say I'm that much in love with summer.

I don't like hot weather. When it's cold, you can put on more layers, but there are only so many layers you can remove in summer before the cops tote you away. And since La Casa del Terror doesn't have air conditioning, I need to have two huge box fans trained on my torso to keep me from melting Margaret Hamilton-style until I'm just an Ed-shaped stain on the futon. (Yes. I know. Ew.)

Still, I prefer that the seasons act like they're supposed to. Winter should be cold and snowy. Fall should be brisk and leafy. Spring should be...okay, Chicago doesn't really have a spring, so it really shouldn't be anything at all. And summer? Should. Be. Hot.

But June was, for the most part, like April and May before it--overcast and cold, especially right on the shoreline of Lake Michigan.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the Windy City is intimately familiar with the phrase "cooler by the lake"; it was even the title of a novel by Larry Heinemann. When the wind comes out the east it blows across the lake, which takes a long time to heat up from winter's chill, especially at its center, where it runs several hundred feet deep. In July and August, this is a boon, providing natural air conditioning to much of the city. When the prevailing wind is out of the east through most of the first half of the year, however, the city remains under a blanket of gloom far longer than normal (if Chicago weather can truly be referred to as "normal").

On June 11, I walked out of the building where I work and saw my breath. That is so wrong.

Amazingly, though, on the first official day of summer, the weather decided to straighten out its act and act like it was June, not March. The sky cleared. The air warmed. Overcoats were put away. Bikinis and sun screen became useful again. Air conditioning in movie theaters became refreshing instead of brutal--and thus sought after by those of us who don't have AC (or lives). La Casa del Terror turned into a broiler once more, and I slept sans underwear. (Yes. I know. Ew. Again. To the Nth.)

And I couldn't have been more thrilled. About summer. Not the underwear thing.

So when coworkers bitch about the heat, I shrug. "It's summer," I tell them. "What were you expecting?" They don't usually have a lucid answer.

Now I do some of the things I most love to do. Like put Sly & the Family Stone's Greatest hits on the new CD player. Or take long walks down to the lake and back again. Or snap pictures of the sights of summer. (I used to do this a lot on Friday afternoons, back when my company had "summer hours"--work an extra half hour the first four days of the week, leave at noon on Friday. They don't have that this year, though. Dammit.) Or just sit out on the back porch with a Red Dog in hand and kill a couple Salems. Or go out to Navy Pier and watch the fireworks go off over Monroe Harbor (something I'll likely do tonight).

Basically, I just find ways to waste time. But what better time of year to do it, especially with so much free time to be wasted?

Have a happy and safe 4th of July, everybody.