Hot fun in the summertime

Now that Memorial Day has passed, we find ourselves facing the summer season head on. Summer is, for most people, the most memorable season each year, as it is the time for vacations, fun activities and quite often when romance blooms. But it can also be a time of great unrest and violence.

It was a hot weekend here in Twinstown, which gave the local chattering classes an opportunity to prattle on about global warming and the like. We hit 97 on Sunday, which is certainly hot by any measure, and it was 94 yesterday before a front came through and dropped the temperature about 20-25 degrees. We discovered that our air conditioning had a problem on Sunday (water leaking around the coil) and so we had to turn off the AC and swelter, but it's not so bad. We'll get things fixed this week and we'll be ready for the the next blast of hot weather to come north. And it's possible that it will never top 97 the rest of the summer. You can't depend on global warming for anything....

One advantage of houses in Minnesota is that they have basements - we have a nice family room in our basement and so we were able to watch movies and baseball games when we needed a respite. We thought a lot about basements when we were considering a move to Oregon late last year. We did not see basements in the houses we looked at in the Portland area; we also noticed that many of the houses did not have air conditioning either. While temperatures are much more moderate in Oregon, they do get hot weather and I wonder how they manage it out there.