Too. Damned. Hot.

For too. Damned. Long.

I don't take the heat well. When I used to live in upstate New York, the summers were generally quite reasonable. You might get about two to three weeks of miserably hot weather in July, and maybe only a week of that when it wouldn't cool down fairly well overnight. We'd run a window A/C unit in the bedroom on the worst nights, and otherwise use a window fan to pull in the cooler night air. The basement of our raised ranch stayed reasonably cool, too, which tempered the whole house, and it was comfortable to read or work on the computer in the den down there.

Looking further north, I grew up and went to college in Maine. I remember one summer when my sublet apartment got downright cold during a rainy spell -- in June. Air conditioning was unheard of. (All right, granted, that was 35 years ago. But I'll wager it's still fairly uncommon.)

Here in this perpetual sauna known as Virginia Beach, the temperature gets into the high 80s and 90s, and stays there for days and weeks on end. "Cooling down" at night means high 70s by 5 am if you're lucky. Some mornings it's so humid that my glasses fog up when I step outside to pick the newspaper up off the driveway. And of course, basements are simply non-existent in these parts, so there's no part of the house that doesn't get blasted with the heat all day.

To a Northerner like me, that's just plain unnatural.