I’m a little busy with stuff that pays the mortgage right now, so Steerpike will be quiet here at Tap for a while. Happens every year around this time.
In the interim, though, I’d like to note that it is currently – according to my neighbor’s outdoor thermometer, at 7:58 PM – 113° in Ann Arbor. That’s 45° to you Metricles. My poor air conditioning is struggling to keep it a mere 82° in my condo.
Steerpike doesn’t like heat. Steerpike has never really liked or trusted the sun, what with its being hot, and just… hanging there. Steerpike is a winter person. Steerpike likes the snow. And Steerpike lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Michigan, supposedly one of those “cold northern” states), and he wants it to be cold and northern. But it’s not. In fact, he had to put his cat in the refrigerator (he shits you not) for a five-minute cooldown because while the AC was out she overheated and began foaming. The vet told Steerpike to put her in the refrigerator. If the vet said it’s okay, Steerpike guesses it’s okay, since it’s just five minutes. She’s fine now, with fridging and the AC back on, but Steerpike literally had to refrigerate his cat on account of this weather.
I’m just saying. Had to fridge a cat. It’s that hot.
With that in mind, the good news is that I bought some dough on the way home today, so I will make car cookies tomorrow!
Send an email to the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
Ajax19 lives 40 minutes away from Steerpike and is jealous of his air conditioning. This is madness.
Ajax19 has a beautiful old house but “old” is Latin for “no air conditioning” and Steerpike sympathizes. You and Mrs. Ajax19 are always welcome to sleep in the unpleasant-but-cooler-than-your-house Tower of Steerpike.
You can put a cat in the fridge? Who knew? That’s hilarious! Hope you are somehow able to keep cool in all this.
Poor kitty!
I live in an old house… with no a/c. Although it’s only been in the 80s here is foggy (once, again YAY!) San Francisco.
I feel for you Steerpike as I do not do well with heat. From what I hear, the heat will be moving East soon so that it can melt the Atlantic seaboard.
I’ve decided that these are the end-days everyone’s been talking about. So, I’m trying to clear out my backlog of games. 😀
I know heat and hate it. Though right now I’m basking in 68 degrees of Portland (smug alert…) cloudy coolness. Tomorrow we will maybe hit 78 and that sort of scares me which tells you how much of a heat wimp I am. 117 degrees is just not right. I actually cancelled a trip to the Midwest last week beacause of my heat phobia. I do have AC so if the heat dome gets lost and accidently wanders this way I’m ready.
*sits in his old ac-less ISLAND OF GRATE BRYTANE, under heavy rain for the last 24 hours, enjoying a refreshing coolness of air blowing through his open windows*
45°C?! Whoa. I moan at 25°C+! And by ‘moan’ I mean ‘start removing clothes’.
I’m also in Ann Arbor. I foolishly had a tennis match at 6:30 pm last night and decided to go through with it. No heat stroke… thankfully there was a good breeze. =)
“Tower of Steerpike”? You don’t happen to have 3 stone spheres next to your driveway do you?
My weather app on my blackberry shows a picture of the sun, but inside the sphere of it, rather than happy yellow, is a fiery red colour with a lightning bolt inside it. Which apparently symbolizes, like, intense heat mixed with brutal thunderstorms?
I walked outside for 5 minutes yesterday and it was disgusting. Feels like about 45 Celsius out.
And keeping your condo at 82? Pfft, that’s nothing. My girlfriend refuses to have the temperature any higher than 75, and when I’m not looking she’ll usually try to crank it below 72. She doesn’t understand the concept of paying for the energy that you use. (This is probably because the bills are in my name, and I pay them. Ha!)
Wyrd One, welcome! You played tennis yesterday? Are you insane? Some lady came to my door wanting me to sign a petition supporting the Great Lakes and I asked her if she was insane, too. I mean, who doesn’t support the Great Lakes, but I ain’t going door-to-door supporting them in this weather.
Nope, no stone spheres. “Tower of Steerpike” may be a bit of an exaggeration actually. We’re talking like a 2.5-story tower. It’s just that before I bought this place I lived in a “garden-level” (read:basement) apartment so everyone called it the Matt Cave. Now I live in the Matt Spire.
Xtal, your girlfriend sounds like a delightful and highly intelligent person. 75 is too hot. 72 is acceptable, but I’m a 67 man myself. You should listen to her. Anyway, we’re North America, we don’t pay for the energy we use. We just attack countries to get more. Give us your tar sands, filthy Canadian!
Yeah, I’m a little bit crazy. It was our team’s final match of the season so I couldn’t bear to miss it. =) My car’s air conditioning died 3 years ago, so I’ve grown accustomed to living with the heat.
There is a house a little down the road from mine, on Pontiac Trail, that recently built a tower onto the front of their house, probably about 2.5 stories high, so when you mentioned the “tower” I instantly thought of that house.
As some of you may know, my partner and I built a house of straw two years ago. Consisting of straw bales 15″ thick set on edge, the walls offer somewhere around R-bitchen’ clad inside and out with stucco cement for a heat capturing thermal mass. Ideal for hot hot hot climates like Arizona and Ann Arbor of late. When the thermometer gets to 100F outside, it rarely gets over 68F inside. That would be excellent in New Mexico and I have long daydreamed of running around with only one of those spanky Pueblan loincoths on, but this is a part of Canada that has seemed to miss the memo on summer and today’s high is 68F/16C outside with daily fog and thunderstorms making the house like an icebox.
Better a cat in the fridge than the fire.
That is redonkulously hot. Like most of you, I wilt in the heat, but have no air con. Waiting to get some solar panels first, to help mitigate the costs associated with the air con. (Incidentally, I moved into my house, and am slowly renovating.)
Will there be pieces of cat in the cookies?
Ahh, beautiful sunny Los Angeles. Where the weather is always perfect.
Dude, you live only about 50 km from the promised land. For some reason I thought you lived in Ohio or something. All those states, they’re all just the same but different in the vowels and amusement parks. Come up some time and we’ll fix your pronunciation.
If I knew how to do strikeout in this bloody WordPress shit I’d cut up Armand’s comment with some witty strikeouts over words like “beautiful,” “sunny,” and “perfect,” and then I’d say “Fixed!” like internet forum trolls love to do.
As it stands, I’ll have to settle for this non-witty explanation of my witty intentions.
Amazingly enough, Los Angeles has been amongst the coolest places in the entire US this summer thus far, at least along the coast. I’m grateful for that, since my house has no AC. And I too wilt under any temps beyond the mid 70s.
The AC was out? In that weather?! Where the hell is Harry Tuttle when you need him!?!?!? I’m with you dude – fuck the heat. Fuck it right in its shitty, hot, humid chocky star fish. Those of us who are of Teutonic and steppe dwelling blood simply aren’t meant to exist in temperatures above, like, 75. Maybe 80 if we have a big tumbler of gin on the rocks to take the edge off. So I loved this article. Thank you for writing it! And I’m glad the cat pulled through okay.