Feeling a Little Bit Under the Weather

There is a saying in St. Louis: If you don't like the weather, wait a minute.  Around winter months, St. Louis has been known to drop temperatures of more than 20 or 30 degrees in one day.

But it is this staggering heat and humidity that St. Louis is known for. On average, in July temperatures will reach about 90 degrees. In just the last seven days, actual temperatures at Lambert International Airport have been recorded at or above 96 degrees (two days at 100 or above), with just yesterday and today feeling relatively balmy at 93 degrees. Crazy.

Actually that is what people tell me when they live out of town and we talk about summer visits. No one in my circle of friends or family who live out of state ever consider coming here during the summer months. While St. Louis may be chocked full of fun, outdoor places, who wants to do them in his oppressive heat? Me neither. Unless it's the pool, my kids don't either.

The reality is that I have lived in the St. Louis metropolitan area for most of my life.  I generally don't fuss too much about the summer heat. As much as humanly possible, I'm used to it. It's rather like Manchester Road traffic. Once you learn to accept it, it's not so bad.

This year, however, I am feeling jipped. Way jipped. If you recall, this spring brought us unusually cool weather and lots of rain. Though it is hard to imagine during this heat wave, we actually wore long-sleeved shirts this May. In fact, I decided against a pool swim pass for this summer because I thought it was going to prove to be a cooler, rainy summer and didn't want to waste money. Wow, was I ever wrong.

But when the warmer weather finally made its way to us to stay, so did the cicadas. We might have had tolerable weather, but they weren't so tolerable. They were down-right nasty in Manchester. It made going outside to enjoy the weather nearly impossible. Finally the cicadas burrowing back to their tree roots in late June meant that we humans could reclaim our summer. 

Not so fast. Did you know that the coolest high temperature this month has been 85 degrees, which was on July 4? The rest of the temperatures for the month have been between 89 and 103 degrees (with 6 days being 100 degrees or higher, which is more than our average 5 days per summer over 100). Our window of 75 to 85 degrees days passed as the cicadas flew overhead. Darn bugs keeping us from wanting to step outside.

With just a few weeks until school starts its new fall semester, I've got to wonder, what happened to the summer? This is a summer that I am likely to remember for all the bad reasons--the oppressive heat and the cicadas. Here's hoping for a cooler (and bug-free) summer 2012. Can I get an Amen?