Tag: heatwave

#oneaday Day 718: Melting

I cursed it. The other day, I said to Andie, "oh, it hasn't been obscenely hot this year yet, has it?" and literally the day after, it became obscenely hot. The air conditioner for the bedroom has come out, the fans are on full blast, and just general existence is suffering right now.

a city during sunset
Photo by Fatih Turan on Pexels.com

Naturally, all the usual arguments are taking place over whether or not people from the UK really have a right to complain about it being hot, given that certain parts of the world are far hotter than it gets here, and they get by perfectly well without air conditioning, what happened to that stiff upper lip and all that, eh what? To anyone having thoughts of that nature, I say a hearty fuck off, it is boiling here and we, as a people, are very much Not Built For That.

We are a people built for overcast days, where the weather just sort of exists in the background without doing anything. We don't mind an occasional rainstorm, because that means we can complain about it. But when it gets hot — and for a good few years now, the summers have been getting real hot — it is actively unpleasant, and quite possibly dangerous for some people. One of the people I work with said that the temperature was almost 40 degrees C in his office today. That is not any sort of condition that a human being should even be attempting to exist in!

But still. At least it's a good opportunity to get the ice out, have some cold drinks, enjoy an ice cream or ten and occasionally sit in the garden if you think you can get away with doing so without irradiating yourself beyond repair. Maybe even have a barbecue! Some people in the nearby vicinity have been having barbecues over the past couple of days and they have smelled delicious. We have not, as yet, planned to do one, because neither of us fancy standing over a hot thing on a hot day, and with only a couple of weeks left until we go away on holiday, the opportunities for socialising before we head off are limited. Maybe when we get back.

Anyway, aside from the heat, today has been relatively unremarkable. I have done some work, I have played some Final Fantasy XI, I enjoyed a chicken sandwich with some Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. The cats have been yelling at us, and all is, it seems, mostly well.

It's just too bloody hot, is what it is!

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#oneaday Day 386: Suboptimal creativity temperature

It is somewhere in the region of 27-28 degrees C here today. I know this is laughable to people who live in the actual desert or tropics or whatever, but it's bloody boiling here in the land of no (well, more like very little these days) air conditioning.

The heat is exhausting, but it's also quite nice. With the stuff Andie has done in the garden, it's really nice to just go and sit either out in the catio or on the nice garden furniture down at the bottom of the garden. We bought a nice parasol from Ikea the other day, so we can sit in the shade when down at the bottom of the garden, and the catio has a certain degree of shade by virtue of it being enclosed.

Trouble is, with it being quite nice to just go and sit in the garden and bask in the heat, it's not exactly conducive to getting anything done. I feel like I want to make some videos, but summoning up the motivation to do so is proving exceedingly troublesome, because doing so will mean locking myself in my study, and there's not much in the way of ventilation in there unless I blast the fans up full (which interferes with voice recording a bit) or have the window open (which brings in outside noise).

It's not so much the practicality of the situation as it is just the sense of lethargy that this heat brings. My brain is saying "let's go", but my body is just going "I want to melt into the sofa". So I think what I might try and do is spend a bit of the daytime scripting some bits and pieces, then once the sun goes down, maybe record into the evening tonight. Then I can spend the remaining daylight hours sitting by the fan doing very little.

The other problem is that the mental lethargy brought about by this heat is it makes making any sort of decision difficult. Do I want to continue with my playthrough of The Sword of Hope? Do I want to do some Atari ST stuff? Do I want to do some Atari 8-bit stuff? Do I want to do some Evercade stuff? Part of the problem is that the answer to all of those is "yes", but from a practical perspective I should probably just pick one or two and be content with that, rather than feeling like I "have" to churn out two, three, four or more videos.

Anyway, when I'm done here I'm going to make that decision, make some notes on what I want to cover, then once the sun dips behind the horizon and things get a little cooler, I might just go and record something. Or I might just leave it until tomorrow. I guess it doesn't really matter all that much.

In the meantime, Xenoblade Chronicles X is a-callin'.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.