Summertime blues

One of my favorite things about living in Maine – or at the very least something I appreciate – is that I get to wear my little thermals 10 months of the year. I started putting them away this week, resigning myself to the heat (and, increasingly, the humidity) of the summer. Following two scorching days that required the use of my portable AC – which I got last summer because Luna was suffering in her heavy fur – an (at one time) rare New England thunderstorm broke the heat on Thursday evening and ushered in three days of cool temperatures and intermittent but mostly heavy rain.

The thermals were back out, albeit briefly. Today, the humidity has reached such a level that I'd almost – almost – prefer the heat. It's just incredibly clammy. So clammy, in fact, that some old smoke alarms started beeping, presumably because they mistake the moisture in the air for actual smoke. A couple of weeks back, on a similarly muggy but cool day, I got a text from my neighbor while I was at Target telling me my smoke alarm was beeping. I raced back to the apartment, concerned for Luna and general property damage, only to find it had quit as quickly and as bafflingly as it had begun. I finally bothered to install a Nest thermostat I bought months ago. I like to check the app and have it tell me "Everything is OK." It's very reassuring.

A couple of days later, I made an – only mildly successful – attempt to make breaded tofu, and the breading got stuck to the pan, which was on medium high, and it, of course, caused a not insignificant amount of smoke and I confirmed that the new smoke alarm does its job just fine. I checked the app and it, like my own senses, told me there was smoke in the living room. Once I removed the pan from the heat and opened as many windows as I could, the app updated to "the smoke is clearing," which I appreciated as well. "Like, yes, that's what I thought was happening."

I have only recently eased back into cooking anything that might cause a smoky pan because my old apartment, the one I lived in before I bought the condo, was in this very old, meticulously restored house in the East End owned by a total lunatic who lived downstairs with his wife and young son, Viceroy. (Yes, the child's name was Viceroy. The child's name is, presumably, still Viceroy.) Not wanting to mar this beautiful house – and it was beautiful, don't get me wrong – with ugly fire doors, he kept the original wood ones (which clearly would have not only allowed the fire to pass between units but probably given the fire a nice little boost) and signed up for a special service with the fire department (a station was just up on Congress Street) where, if a smoke alarm went off anywhere in the house, they would come a-running immediately, sirens blazing. I had moved into this place in November 2021 after I learned my old building was going to be sold and decided I didn't want to stay around to find out what the new owners were like. (They were bad, I'm told, and pretty much continued my old landlord's tradition of neglect and absenteeism, but added loud parties in the basement thrown by the crew of their mega-yacht, whose accommodation was the reason for the purchase. Thank god we created a historical district to protect the character of buildings like these. Hilariously, when she announced the sale of the building to the current tenants, my old landlord crowed about how happy she was that the building would remain "workforce housing." "THAT IS INDEED ONE WAY TO PUT IT, BARBARA.")

Contrary to those landlords, the new one seemed like a stickler from the jump (the day he showed me the apartment, as we walked upstairs, he noted a microscopic nick in the wall with great disapproval, telling me in a conspiratorial tone that he suspected it had been made by the current tenant's surf board) and thus was very careful to always abide by his random rules. He regularly smoked pot down in the basement surrounded by his various artifacts, but claimed to have a sensitive nose and thus forbade the use of bleach or patchouli in the house. (The rent was below market.) I was the perfect tenant – he was sad when I moved out! – because I made sure to make myself as unobtrusive as possible, and that included discontinuing the preparation of any meal that might prompt a loud and embarrassing visit from the Portland Fire Department.

"It's just my gnocchi," I would have to say sheepishly to several burly dudes whose card game I had just interrupted. "It needs to get a little crispy."

The other day, I parked my car on a street adjacent to the one my old apartment was on, and ended up walking down that street towards my office, but did an about-face as soon as I saw that my old landlord was standing, as had been his habit while I lived there, in the small side yard, surveying the street for things that displeased him.

Anyway, I now can cause a complete conflagration if I'd like, but the heat makes that less appealing and the clammy humidity just puts a film over everything that makes cooking feel somehow unsanitary.

I am dreading July. Last year, it was seemingly weeks of this, alternating between incredible heat and then periods of low temps but high humidity. In the upstairs bedroom, I kept the portable AC going almost constantly, either to cool the air or remove some of the moisture. I used to brag about Maine summers, and they are still obviously better than the non-stop heat and humidity of the Midwest and Upper South (though last June, in South Carolina, it was unseasonably cool with brief evening thunderstorms or spells of light rain), but they aren't what they once were. When I moved here in 2015, you'd rarely see more than a handful of days over 85, and very little humidity, even in August. Now it's like this. I had hoped that last year was an outlier, but it seems it may be the new normal.

At work, we've just moved into a new office and it's location right near the waterfront means I can bike in without having to weather Wash. Ave and its chaos. There's a bike room and a locker room with a shower. I biked in our second week in the office, and it was a great way to start the morning, taking in Back Cove (though the mud flats weren't that enticing) and then Casco Bay (which was much lovelier) along with a lot of lush green foliage. I was excited to have this be my commute for the next few months. However, after taking the long way home in the evening, my suspension block – which, in addition to absorbing a fair amount of force, also is how the back wheel attaches to the rest of the bike, how it fully unfolds – literally fell off. I easily gathered up the block itself, but there were some key elements that must have dropped off at some point on the ride: a nyloc nut, a washer, and something whose name I can't recall. I ordered the a replacement kit from the same bike shop in the other Portland where I had bought the bike originally.

I love my bike (it's a Brompton), but this also means I am also very afraid of touching it, or doing anything to alter it in anyway, including basic maintenance, because I am afraid I will break it and then be unable to enjoy it. (I feel there's probably some larger psychological issue at play here.) Thus, even once the block arrived, I avoided doing this – to be clear, incredibly simple – repair. Like, what if it fell off again? What if I put it on too tight and then it warps the frame in some way? (It is a very small bolt.)

Anyway, after avoiding it for five days, I finally did it yesterday and thus should be back on the bike commute for tomorrow. (Unless it falls apart in route! I cannot rule it out.)