It’s summertime, and I used to love summer, but now I’m starting to loathe it.
- It’s too warm during the day to want to go outside, and the heat, whether average or excessive, is a constant reminder of global warming. We’ve already had two or three heatwaves this summer. During a heatwave we can’t even enjoy the outdoors at night or sleep without the AC.
- Ticks and mosquitoes. They’re everywhere. You can’t step in a patch of grass or brush against a plant without wondering if you now have a tick crawling on you. That’s not paranoia. It’s just the way things are. And the mosquitoes are always lurking. Sometimes they linger around our front and back doors, which makes it easy for them to sneak inside, and I always wonder how they know to be there. They can’t know what doors are (portals to the inside of a home, where tasty human meals await), so what makes doors so attractive from a mosquito’s point of view?
- The kids are home all the time, while I have to work and can’t spend much time with them. This summer is particularly bad in that respect, because my employers stuck me with an unforgiving schedule that makes taking vacation time nearly impossible. I’ve had to work longer-than-usual days just to keep up.
- There’s hardly anywhere interesting to go where there aren’t too many people. Ever since that awful trip to the renaissance faire (when we had to wait forever for food and Livia literally passed out while standing in line), I’ve been leery of taking the kids anywhere. Everything has gotten super expensive, too. So I guess it’s fine that I have no time for it anyway.
- Summer is when our health, home, and auto insurance plans all renew, and the premiums always increase and/or we lose benefits. Health insurance is the worst. It’s evil, and a scam, and every July at renewal time I want to scream. This year we’re losing out-of-network coverage, which is scary. If we should have an emergency and need to go to an out-of-network provider, we will have to pay 100% out of pocket and it will not count toward our deductible. The alternative was to pay an extra $3,000 per year up-front to get a paltry 50% out-of-network coverage. That didn’t seem like a good bet, but a gamble is exactly what this is, and who knows how it will play out? Our home and auto renewal package arrived in the mail a couple of days ago. I haven’t had the courage to open it yet.
There are still some great things about summer–sunset walks, dragonflies and hummingbirds, wildflowers, grilled food–but it gets harder to enjoy them.
I hope it won’t always be like this.
I hope someday I’ll be able to love summer again.