We caved and bought an air conditioner and, after nearly dropping it out the window (ha!), installed it with nary a problem. The hot hot heat had been making us a little crazy, and the fact that the living room is now a place a person who isn’t three months old (!) can sit in semi-comfort is a big quality of life improvement.

Having lived without air conditioning before that, I was surprised to see the New York Times’ assertion the other day (I decided not to bother linking because the link would only last for a week, and it’s a pain in the neck, and I never really link to anything. This is not that sort of a blog.) that it’s generally accepted that people are more bothered by winter than by summer. They were reporting this apparently commonly held theory in the context of saying that the heat was actually making people in New York grouchy. Sort of a “dog bites food” story, if you ask me.

In any event, I have long held that summer is several times less tolerable than is winter. This is because, practically speaking, there is no real limit to how many clothes you may put on to brave the cold. Add that to the fact that, outside of waiting for the bus, most outside winter activities – shoveling, walking, skiing – involve getting all warmed up while you do them.

Summer, on the other hand, does not afford such leeway. Shorts and a t-shirt is not all that much warmer than being naked, and so even if it was cool to wait for the bus or do yard work – careful, now – in the buff, it would hardly be worth it. When it’s 95 degrees out with a dew point of 70, you will just not be comfy outside.

Imagine if winter was exactly the same as summer, only cold: you’d do your best to dress up warmly, but then walking outside would render all your sweaters and fleece hats irrelevant. The cold would be unbearable until you got somewhere with heaters blasting away. No one would be able to shovel, which might be ok, since shoveling is a terrible activity. And don’t give me any guff about how unpleasant it can be to hop into a car that’s been sitting in the driveway all night in January. Yeah, your hands are cold on the wheel, but you aren’t shivering. A hot car sucks right away, and there’s nothing you can wear to mitigate it.

So there’s that. Max disagrees with all this, of course, as the entire world is womb-like during a heatwave. Maybe this is why super hot weather makes people grouchy: it gives the psychological effect of being not-yet-born, which could be unsettling as you try to get things done. Also, though this is for another day, being hot means buying air conditioners, which often means going to Home Depot, which is my candidate for Worst-Run Business, Ever, Including All Spanish Banks and Realtors.