One thing I have learned about living here:

a "cold front" can easily turn into a "stationary front." Which means that the anticipated cooler weather never never comes. That is one of the most disheartening things to hear on The Weather Channel.

it is depressingly hot. I cannot even begin to describe the depths of misery of the heat and humidity here. It is one of the most sucking-away-the-joy-of-life things I know to step out on your doorstep at 6:50 am and have it be 80* and almost unbreathably humid, and to walk out of your office building at 6:50 pm and have it be in the upper 90s and the sun feel like it's going to scorch you as you walk the 20 feet from your door to your car.

And one of the classrooms in which I teach - it's my evening class, too, when I'm already tired - well, at the end of the introduction to class last night, when my co-teacher and I asked if there were any questions, one of the students put up his hand and said, "Does it get any cooler in here?" I think I'm going to see if there's a box-fan somewhere in the department; if not, I'm going to buy and donate one on the stipulation that it is always to be used for that classroom.

The five-day forecast shows NO relief. No rain, no daytime highs cooler than 96*, no lowering of the humidity. This is the time of year when I'm at my lowest - I know, Lileks talks about the "black dog" biting at his heels as summer starts to recede, and I suppose when you live as near the Arctic Circle as he does, it's hard to see summer go. But here - we're going to have summer for perhaps two to three more months, and August really is the bottom of the pit - nothing changes, the air doesn't move, there is no rain, it's not possible to get cool even if you run your air conditioner so much that the president of O.G. and E. calls you up personally to thank you for your financial support, you wake in the middle of the night to realize that your sheets and your pillowcase and everything fabric in your world feels like it's been taken directly out of the washer and put on your bed wet, eating is something you do because you dimly realize you will pass out if you don't take in a few calories now and then...nothing brings joy, nothing brings a sense of relief.

The first year I was here, this is the time where I looked at the calendar, got up from my desk, quietly closed my office door, and put my head down on my desk and wept. Because I realized it was still TWO WEEKS to Labor Day, and after that, it was still at least a month before temperatures became noticeably cooler.

If, as some of the analysts predict, there will come a time in the future when 'climate controlled environments become a fond memory' (because oil and gas are too expensive to use to generate electricity and there's been no viable alternative found), I will probably move far far away. Where, I don't know. Perhaps somewhere where I can have a small enough, well-enough-insulated house that I could heat with wood in the winter. Because you know, I wouldn't live through this kind of summer without air conditioning. It boggles my mind to think that people even settled here (or worse, in places like New Orleans) before the invention of air conditioning. All I can imagine is that all commerce, all activity, everything, stopped in August and everyone sat around in the most-interior, darkest room of their house and fanned themselves. (And ice - there wouldn't even be any ice before electricity was wide spread). How did people survive, especially the women, who in the early 1900s were expected to wear corsets and chemises and layers of petticoats and skirts down the the floor? I wonder what death rates were like in the summer, and if heatstroke was a recognized condition...