Summer’s heat is long overdue
By Lethbridge Herald on July 19, 2024.
LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber – Managing Editor
Don’t complain about the heat to me. Just don’t. After a spring that never seemed to end, southern Alberta is finally getting a taste of summer.
With daytime temperatures in the 30s – we’re supposed to get a high of 38 in coming days – we’re finally getting the weather many of us have been waiting for. These are the kind of temperatures that let us enjoy deck time on weekends with family and friends or even a pre-work coffee without needing to don a sweater.
To a degree – bad choice of word – I can handle the heat. And as hot as it can get here, I’ve still never been as uncomfortably warm in southern Alberta as I often was in Northern Ontario where the humidity made heat worse. While many in Alberta use humidifiers to add moisture to the air, dehumidifiers are commmonplace there where blankets, pillows and even clothes can feel perpetually – I hate to use this word – moist. Yes, moist. Not dripping wet but just moist. Or damp. Your choice of words.
Having experienced summer living in a trailer – I mean mobile home – with tin roof in the Walleye Trailer Court no less, and no fans to move air around the sporadically cleaned accommodations, never mind air conditioning, I know how uncomfortable hot weather can be.
You don’t need a sauna when you can just spend nights and weekends inside a tin can with plumbing and cable television. That may be one reason why I spent so much time at the bar in my youth where we would inevitably head to hydrate after working out at the nearby gym complex or in winter after hockey which was played at the adjacent arena.
As one who inadvertently placed a bag of perogies in a cupboard instead of the freezer compartment in a fridge in the summer of 1985 or ’86 at the trailer, I mean mobile home, I know how fast heat can create odours that a human being really doesn’t want to smell.
If not for one astute coworker who bravely came over to help clean one weekend, I probably wouldn’t have noticed that bag of Cheemo’s finest for weeks. And they were probably sauerkraut, too, which would have turned up the grossness a notch or three.
It was pretty rank, not to the same level as the minnow bucket that was forgotten in the trunk of my Chevy Caprice for three days once, but if you cross skunk spray with a dead mouse then you probably get an idea of what my kitchen smelled like.
So I won’t complain about the heat which has been an opportunity to get some colour onto my legs which normally would best be described as corpse-esque. In fact, Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale could be their theme song most years because wearing shorts is something I absolutely detest.
I get that a lot of guys of all ages have no problems showing off their knobby knees and thigh blubber to the world around them but not this one. The last thing I need is Greenpeace showing up at Costco to pull me back to the ocean.
So on the hottest days, this guy wears full-length pants unless I’m in the backyard and nobody except the dogs and birds munching at the feeders can see me. But to avoid making them sick, I don’t go bare chested, too.
I have sympathy for animals, after all so I don’t want to witness a bunch of crows or sparrows suffer heart failure en masse after seeing a guy in desperate need of a man bra and fake tan between the belly rolls stretching out on a lawn chair while they’re trying to eat.
Even yesterday morning while enjoying a morning coffee at 4:45 a.m. in the dark sitting on a wet metal chair as rain fell during a lightning storm next to a steel umbrella pole – what could possibly go wrong there? – I kept my robe closed lest any feathered friends in the towering poplars were awake and watching.
And while I know people dress however they feel suits them in the heat one thing that I find cringeworthy is seeing motorcyclists ripping down Whoop-Up wearing shorts and sandals. Not only are hot mufflers painful – again from personal experience – but to hit the pavement at high speed with not even a thin layer of denim between a rider’s legs and asphalt is just not the wisest thing to do.
But we see it all the time. Whether on cruisers or sport bikes, numerous riders will be all too casual when going for a rip. And motorcyclists can’t afford to be casual, again which I know from personal experience after a car driver back in the mid 1990s drove through a stop sign and knocked me off an old Honda 500 just yards from the Herald door. Luckily the bike fell on me or it would have been damaged and just as lucky I was wearing full-length jeans or my left leg and hip would have looked like ground beef.
Or more accurately ground chalk. Not sure a vulture would have even touched that.
So no matter how warm the temperature gets, there are certain times when we just have to be willing to endure the heat for safety sake. And safety doesn’t mean buying extra boxes of beers when theyre on sale because as we keep being warned by the no-fun health police, hydrating liquids are supposed to be non-alcoholic and have no caffeine, which to me takes away the point of even sitting outside.
19-18
Thank you for the laughs and scary visuals Al. “All the gear all the time” quickly became the mantra regarding riding motorcycles after both experiencing and witnessing how horribly asphalt can shred human flesh and bone. The death of one, and severe maiming of a second friend who were only wearing 1/2 helmets encouraged me to wear full face helmets; both riders doing less than 25 kmph. “Ride Again” became the secondary mantra. Like yourself I rarely wear shorts because I simply do not want to frighten young children… ha, ha.