This forecast, screencapped from the Weather Channel's website for Newton (go look if you don't believe me) is laughable for a number of reasons. For one, it says the lows are going to get down into the 60s by this weekend.
It was 81 degrees last night at 1:45 AM. It had been 79 an hour or two before that. How do I know this? Because I was awake and on Skype with Daisy and watched the temperature go up outside.
Also, why bother saying "isolated t-storms" for tomorrow as if they're going to happen? There will be no rain or storms with the temperature over 100 in Kansas. Ever. That doesn't happen here. Any precipitation would evaporate before it hits the ground, and to have a thunderstorm you generally need a cold front. Does 104 degrees look like a cold front to you? No. There's not a "30% chance," there's a zero percent chance unless some crazy weather system develops out of thin fucking air.
It's 99 right now. There's no air moving outside. The sun is unhindered by clouds. Kansas is fucking baking like an oven. And it's 8PM.
I have been forced to run the air conditioner or otherwise melt. I can't afford to, really, and I have to watch it very closely, because once it runs for a while, if it's really hot outside, the condenser will freeze up. Yes, the condenser on the unit itself, outside. It will freeze up and become coated in ice, and the unit itself will stop blowing cold air. In fact, it'll stop blowing air period -- yet, the fan will be running and the unit will not power off. It will still cost me an outlandish sum of money to run it, since it will still be on and running, yet it won't do anything. I'm pretty sure my central AC unit is older than I am. I'm also pretty sure that most older AC units will do this if they're left running at full blast for eight hours straight (or more) because one's house is so hot that even when it runs that long and hard, it won't get down below 84 or so inside (when the thermostat is set at 82). It was overhauled and repaired two years ago when it had a leak of some sort, and since then it's been fine except when it gets so hot that the unit basically throws up its hands and says "FUCK IT."
So, I've been running it a few hours every day -- usually in the mornings/early afternoon when I get up, and sometimes again in the overnight hours for an hour or two before I go to bed. It will cool the house down enough to be somewhat tolerable. Downstairs, about half of the day it's actually rather cool, since my bedroom is in the below-ground basement. In the interim, when it's off during the day, the house will slowly heat back up.
It's not been below 85 in my Man Cave upstairs for the better part of the last month. My room upstairs captures heat like a greenhouse for some reason, much much worse than any other room in the house. I've gotten up at 7 or 8AM and it's still 88 in here when the windows are open, no electronics are on or running, and it's only 72 outside. There's no rhyme or reason to it.
Yet it's only like that in this room. Outside of this room, most of the time, it tends to be much cooler.
The cats realize it's hot; they've been spending most of their time downstairs under the bed (their favorite sleeping spot) or in the downstairs bathroom where their food/litter is, sleeping on the tile floor. I put Daisy's high-powered fan on me when I sleep, and they sleep on the bed with me then. At night when I'm awake, they'll all be up here with me in my room or in the hallway/living room, because it's a bit cooler at night. As I told my mother, who was worried about the cats when I'll be gone to Omaha over the 4th, they're resilient creatures, and they're smart. When they're hot, they go lay somewhere that's cool. I've been gone in the summer before on numerous occasions when it's been much hotter than it has been this summer, and they've always been fine. It's not like stray cats who live outside in 120-degree climates all keel over and die when it gets hot -- my indoor cats who have never (and never will) set foot outside will be just fine in the much-cooler basement of my house when it's 100 outside.
Not to mention that it's not like I would leave for Omaha without leaving them gallons of water and buckets of food and litter. I even plan to leave one of the fans on downstairs for them so that there's some air movement.
I don't know exactly what the plans are for the Omaha trip yet; Daisy is off today and tomorrow, and then works until the 1st. I'm guessing that means she'll come down here on the 2nd (Tuesday) and we'll either go back up that night or the next day. The 4th is a week from tomorrow, and even though it's one of her normal nights off, she still gets eight hours of holiday time sometime that week free-and-clear (from my shaky understanding of what she tells me, anyhow). That may mean she gets the 5th off, or most of it, or something along those lines. What I do know is that I'll more than likely be up there with her and her family for the better part of a week, until her next cycle of days off comes around again and we come back home to Kansas. The plus side is that it's only supposed to be in the mid-80s here (again, according to the Weather Channel, but as their above forecast was laughable, who knows) during that week, so I'm not concerned about leaving the cats alone when it's 100 degrees outside, but you folks know me -- as much as I love and adore Daisy's parents (and I do, I really do), the vast majority of my stay up in Omaha, Daisy will more than likely be working, and I won't have my car or any real knowledge of the area to be able to get out of the house and do anything. Not to mention that, y'know, I won't really have any money to spend anyhow. When I next go to Walmart (probably tomorrow night or Friday night) I'll be getting some cash back when I pick up some groceries, but it'll be a minimal amount -- enough to have some cash on me and enough to get a haircut while I'm in Omaha, but that's about it.
I also told Daisy that I oh-so-terribly, desperately want to go back to the Chinese buffet we went to when I visited last time. Her response to this was tepid at best.
Update: Daisy does have the 5th off as well, which means she'd only have to work basically the weekend days while I'm there. We're planning to do a little running about town and get my hair cut on that day, if at all possible.
In other news, I have applied for a few more positions, including one at the University of Nebraska and one at an internet company. Might as well, you know? It's not looking like I'm going to get a slew of interview requests anytime soon from anywhere else I've applied, and my money situation, while it's fine right now, is only going to get progressively grim and dire as the weeks and months go on. Daisy had a phone interview this afternoon with the same aforementioned company, as they have an amazing benefits package, but she's pretty sure she won't get a second callback.
I tried to go downstairs to nap earlier; while it is much cooler downstairs than it is up here, I also couldn't sleep -- I was hungry, I had to get up and go to the bathroom twice, and I couldn't get comfortable. The downstairs is still the most comfortable place in the house, but I don't have a computer down there (obviously).
"I worry about you tomorrow," Daisy told me earlier tonight.
"Why?"
"Because it's going to be hot there!"
"But...it's already hot here..."
Fuck it. If I can get it to cool down enough tonight by running the AC for a few hours, I'll stay up until 4 or 5AM and then go to sleep with the fan on me for the hottest hours of the day. Because there is no conceivable reason to be awake and upstairs tomorrow when it's supposed to be 104. If I'm downstairs where it's cooler, and with the fan on me to boot, I'll sleep through most of it. When it gets that hot, that's about all one can do, honestly -- sleep through it or melt.
Well, at least my face is a bit cooler.
Even though it is still 90 degrees and feels like 100.7 at 9:50 PM.
The one other plus is that apparently it's too hot for even the spiders to come out -- or maybe the traps I set up everywhere are working. Regardless, I've only killed two or three spiders throughout this entire past week or so, when before I was killing that many per day. I've seen a few other little wolf spiders that I've let live; they'll eat the recluse and/or the cats'll get them, and they're not a threat to my well-being. I don't want them crawling on me, of course, but generally they're better to have than not have.
Rae was telling me that there's now black widows in Ohio, apparently. At least in the Cincinnati area. There have also been confirmed widows in the Wichita area, too, but luckily even in my traps/cleaning/spider patrols I've never seen any here either in or outside the house as of yet. This is good, as if I did I'd probably never sleep again.
I haven't showered in over two days; this is because, really, it's mostly pointless -- ten minutes after I get out of the shower, while it feels good during the process, I am once more completely drenched in sweat. Because I never leave the house in the daytime when it's this hot, Daisy told me today that I'm so white that I've transcended normal white and have become "fluorescent." It's an apt description.
On that note, I'm going to attempt to ingest more fluids and cool down a bit more.
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