Tag: Heat

It’s a Hot One Out There

The heatwave has arrived. It’s 93 degrees outside. Wait, don’t you have to be over 90 for three days to officially rank as a heatwave? So maybe it’s more correct to say that the potential heatwave has arrived. Whatever.

I still have the windows open in my little office space. My Nest app is telling me that it’s 81 degrees in this room and 76 degrees in the living room. It’s definitely warm enough to approach being uncomfortable, but given that since losing weight I find myself really cold all the time… it’s kinda nice right now. For the first time in months I don’t feel cold at all. Not even a little bit.

I just got a public safety alert on my phone. Looks like the 9-1-1 service is down for the entire state of Massachusetts. Here’s hoping none of my neighbors need to call for emergency services any time soon. It would suck to dial 9-1-1 and get a busy signal or some sort of error message.

Similar to yesterday, I am still exhausted. I failed to get six hours of sleep yet again last night, though I only missed it by about five minutes this time. I’m really tired. Really, really tired.

Three hours left in the work day. Fingers crossed I can make it through in one piece. Also, fingers crossed we don’t melt in the heat today, and fingers crossed we don’t need to call for an emergency service. Hang in there, Massachusetts.

Feels Like Friday

It feels like Friday.

It’s not Friday.

It’s Thursday.

But it still feels like Friday.

I spent the time I thought I would be waiting for the furnace installation to start to move my desk back to our bedroom and give Harry his room back. My chair is still there. So is the little clock I bought. I need to find a new home for that puppy.

I didn’t do it because there is a heater in our bedroom. I did it because I had a handful of meetings over the next couple of days that I need to be contributing too. The bedroom happens to be about as far away from the furnace as you can get and still be in the house. I did not do it for the heat. I did it for the quiet. Also, because spending my days in my kids’ room felt wrong. When the Covid scare required me to quarantine myself it was one thing. That was almost two months ago. It was time to go back to my own room.

Who would have thought that I would have so much influence? Last night I logged into facebook for the first time in a month, just long enough to tell people I was taking a break. After about five minutes I was gone again. I will re-evaluate on November 27, 2021 but it’s looking like I might want to make this final.

Then, thanks mostly to my crusade, Zuckerberg changed the name? Jen just told me that Zuckie is changing the name from facebook to Meta. Ugh. You’re so meta, markie. I told her that he should have renamed the company Metal. That would have been so much cooler. So much… cleaner.

I guess Zuck just couldn’t deal with my exit. Sorry, hoodie man. Start treating nazis like bad guys and maybe I’ll come back. Get on that, bro. Cleaning out the nazi filth would be so meta, bro. It would be pretty metal too.

Humid

Things stayed quiet last night, other than the 3:30-4:00am bathroom experience I mentioned in the last post. Outside of that it was okay. I failed to hit the five hours of sleep mark, but only because I was awake for that half hour. I only came up short by a few minutes. My SleepWatch numbers weren’t great, my heartrate dip was only 11%, but I am feeling okay right now. We’ll see how I feel around 3:00pm today. I’m guessing I will be a bit of a mess.

My parents are okay, dad is still asleep. I have 20 minutes to go until I have to give them their meds, and the home health help should be here around the same time. None of that is the story today.

No, the story today is the weather. Specifically the heat and humidity. It was still 80 degrees out at midnight last night. It’s 77 right now, but the humidity… There is so much moisture in the air that just sitting here has me drenched in sweat. There are two air conditioners in the house, one in my mother’s bedroom and a huge one in the living room. Neither of my parents like to have them on. I don’t even know why I put them into the windows this year. The big one displays the air temperature in the room and my father doesn’t like to turn it on unless the room temperature is above 80. Yes, you read that right… 80 degrees.

I have my little desk fan, which is pretty much the hero of 2021, and someone also brought a bigger, yet still small enough to keep on the desk, fan that I have on the floor blowing straight up at me. Those two things together will hopefully keep me from overheating or literally drowning in my own sweat. The forecast is calling for mid nineties with humidity in the high nineties (it’s 96% right now) and a heat index (whatever that is) that should make it feel about 10 degrees hotter than it is.

Yippee.

Should be an exciting day. Duck and cover and stay cool, folks.

Fans

It’s not particularly hot out today, nor does it seem to be particularly humid. For some reason though, I am covered with sweat, head to toe. I feel like I just jumped into the shower.

It started when I took the laundry down cellar before work started. Over the last four weeks or so, “laundry” has been code for finding an excuse to go down cellar and check on the flood. I actually do laundry on these trips but it really is not the primary reason for going down stairs.

I vacuumed up Lake Asshole, dumped out the wet vac, and dumped out the dehumidifier. I also did a load of laundry. An hour later I went back down to flip the laundry to the dryer, but also vacuumed up the latest puddles. An hour after that I went down again to bring up the load of laundry and did the same vacuuming update. At lunch I carried a huge desk from Bellana’s room to the cellar, and then vacuumed up the much smaller puddles and emptied the dehumidifier again.

I am drenched with sweat. I have the wall mounted AC in the bedroom cranking, and a second fan on the floor blowing right on me and still I am drenched. The upside of all of this is the exercise.

Yesterday when I mowed the entire lawn (ouch), I closed the exercise ring in my AppleWatch Activity App. Bonus! By the time the day was done I had closed all three rings for the first time in ages. That was a good feeling. Even better, my SleepWatch app numbers from last night were out of this world. Everything except the total amount of sleep time (six hours and 50 minutes) was as good as it gets.

It made me think… is it time to start closing those rings again? Yesterday was the first of the month… could I get back on the wagon with a perfect month? I don’t know. It’s tough to close the exercise ring when I am at my parents, and even harder when I am at the office. It might be a challenge.

With all the lifting and going up and down the stairs over and over today, I’m already about half way to my 30 minute exercise ring today. The 10 minutes of walking I did before work didn’t hurt. heheh

We’ll see how it goes.

Now I Have to Worry About This Too?

Climate Change. You hate it. You actually hate it more than you hate the people who pretend it isn’t happening, but only by a little.

As we watch the west coast burn, and the Northeast drown, and last month the Northwest melt, and all of the awful things they warned us about 10-20 years ago start happening… it’s scary, right?

Well now there’s this.

Back story, earlier today I took a shower. Also this morning, Harry left after a brief stop over (long enough to watch the Loki finale). He’s spending the weekend visiting Bellana in Vermont. I hope it doesn’t rain as much for him as it did for us. Anyway. I took a shower before he left, and after he left I asked Jen for a hug cause I was feeling sad about him leaving and once the hug started I told her it wasn’t going to stop. She laughed at me and told me I was too sweaty. Yup. It’s summer, it’s humid, I’m fat, I sweat a lot.

Fast forward about an hour and a half and I am wrapping up my morning car music. The sports radio station I was listening to was starting a segment talking about MMA. Once I stopped vomiting I plugged in my iPhone and picked the podcast episode at the top of my latest episodes list. It was a podcast called Cyber from a podcast network called Vice. It’s in my subscriptions list (Apple’s podcast doesn’t use the word subscribe anymore. It uses follow instead. I guess it’s because subscribe is too complicated a word to understand) but I don’t think I’ve listened to a whole hell of a lot of their content. I listened to this one though.

The episode was called “It’s Not The Heat, It’s The Humidity That’s Killing Us”. Sounds like fun.

The topic dealt with something called “wet bulb conditions“. Never heard of it. Apparently it’s a point where the temperature and humidity levels combine TO KILL YOU. You sweat in order to cool down your body. Apparently there is a point where there is too much moisture in the air for your sweat to evaporate so your body doesn’t cool and you spontaneously die.

LOVELY.

Now, as a fat guy who sweats a lot I have this shit to worry about too? Wonderful.

Merry christmas, everyone.

What Should We Talk About?

My lunch break is ending and I haven’t thought of anything to talk about.

It’s hot. There’s that. It’s not as hot as it is out Oregon way and the Pacific Northwest, but it’s hot. It’s 94 degrees here in Tewksbury, MA right now. We might get another degree or so, but it’s about as hot as it’s going to get today. The heat index, whatever that is, says it could feel about 10 degrees hotter than it is. The forecast for Portland, OR calls for afternoon temps around 113. It’s still June. Summer isn’t even 10 days old and already Portland is looking at 113 degrees. Nothing to see here. Please disburse. Nothing to see here.

I just took out the trash and the recycling. We have security alarms on the doors because my mother went wandering at the crack of dawn recently and snuck out silently enough that she didn’t wake anyone. So now the doors make noise when we open them. At night they make tremendous noise a la a rock band in a stadium volume level noise. I took four trips to bring everything out and didn’t want to keep setting off the quieter, daytime noise so I just left the door open… and now there’s a fly in here with me. Sonofabitch.

Hold it a second, I have to give mother her 2:00 pills. Be right back………

Okay, I am back. It’s 2:00 so I have to get back to work. I was trying to think of what to write about and didn’t come up with much. Here were the rejected topics, all of which might come up again later. Should I call Mike the Bass Player and ask if he’s going to be around this weekend so that I can pick up my amp and my little pedal board, both of which have been in his cellar waiting for a band practice since the first day of February 2020? Should I finally shut up about it and bring that guitar and that amp over to Guitar Center in Nashua and trade them in? On Saturday, maybe? Should I try again to make an eye doctor’s appointment for this weekend? We tried last weekend and their online appointment scheduler was down. Ugh.

Okay. Back to work, you. You have code to patch!

Bank Robbery

There was another bank robbery in Methuen today.  According to the Lawrence Eagle Tribune, that makes four in six weeks.

I don’t get it.  Most banking is electronic today.  How much money do branches even have on the premises, and of that, how much is in each teller’s draw?  I can’t imagine it’s a very large amount.  Let’s say this douche went into the credit union branch, waved his symbolic penis gun around and made off with a couple of teller drawers full of cash.  Let’s also ignore little things like die packs and marked bills or whatever banks do these days to keep stolen money from being used.  What does he get out of it?  A couple months rent and something shiny for his best gal?  Is it even possible for a bank robber in the 21st century to make a five figure score?  How big of a bag do you need to carry $10 grand if you’re stealing from a teller?  Would you be better off knocking over a McDonald’s?  How much time does it take for a teller to put $10,000 into a bag?  I’m guessing more time than it takes the police to respond to the alarm.

Then there is the repetition factor to think about.  The Methuen police are already investigating three of these things.  How pissed off are they going to be when they catch you?  Supremely pissed, I would guess.  It won’t be good cop/bad cop when they interrogate you.  It’ll be bad cop/super crazy Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon cop.  You risk getting thrown off a building like that jumper did in the movie.  Why don’t we be objective.  Think about it… what would Robert DeNiro’s character in Heat have said if some one asked him to be bank robber in one city in six weeks.  There’s no way a professional super thief like that would ever even consider taking a job like that.  No way!  Even if he didn’t have Al Pacino on his trail.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is this:  It’s not worth it.  If desperation drove this guy to do this today, or in any of the other three bank robberies, then the reward of a successful job is going to be tiny compared to the risk, and then inevitable retribution.

It’s a simple matter of balance.  Does a small short term gain balance out a large long term punishment?  Not from where I’m sitting.