it's too hot.

It was 79 degrees at 8:30 this morning. Outside of my apartment. I think the inside maintained at a balmy 82, while every fan we own is desperately trying to circulate the heavy, wet air that blankets everything, thwarting our every attempt at relief.

I didn't have coffee this morning. I could have. Ben bought a Kona blend at Trader Joe's this past weekend, apparently struck by a crisis of conscience when he realized

1. he really likes cold brew, and
2. I make all the cold brew that he drinks.

It's a source of some quiet pride to me even though the process is simple. He orders cold brew from Starbucks sometimes on Wednesdays, when we wander down to the farmer's market in Kendall Square and contemplate produce.

So the Kona has been steeping away in the French press in the refrigerator, and it's the best $10-20 price range item I've bought in a long time, in terms of the usage it gets. Hot coffee from it in the winter, cold brew from it in the summer.

Cold brew is nice. I know I've talked about it before, but it's more mellow, less acidic. More suitable for those hot mornings when you wake up and all you want to do is bathe in ice cubes, because you can water it down with coffee or with milk and it doesn't taste heavy. We go through a lot more heavy cream in the winter, but it's just too much in the summer.

The Kona smells nice. I haven't tried it yet. I pressed it last night and poured it off into a ball jar, started a new round so that we'll have plenty come the weekend. This weekend is supposed to hit 88/90 and I'm thinking I might go in to work just so that I don't spend the entire 48 hours lying limply on the futon watching the fans oscillate. Breeze, still, breeze, still.

I mean, I'm still making the cold brew. I just didn't buy this particular set of beans-ground-coarse. But there's no real work to cold brew coffee. I weigh the grounds out, just because we have a food scale. 120g, usually, or thereabouts, then I dump them into the French press and pour in cold water from the pitcher we keep in the fridge. Stir to wet the grounds, let them steep. Stir once more several hours later when the grounds are saturated. Then wait.

Ben broke that pitcher a couple of weekends ago, the pitcher I used to keep orange juice in, sometimes, in my old apartment in New Haven. Water is a much better candidate for it, because it never goes moldy. I'm fairly cyclical about what I like and what I don't. Hot and cold. Inevitably, orange juice would just kind of fall out of favor and then months later I'd pull the pitcher out of the back of the fridge (nothing nice lurks at the back of the fridge) and try not to gag as I disposed of the juice that maybe wasn't very orange anymore. This doesn't happen with water.

Anyway, it's so hot that condensation is a constant these days, and he was lifting it up to take it out of the fridge and it slipped from his fingers and broke, spilling cold water and glass shards across the linoleum. He felt bad about it and ordered us a new one. This one is exactly the same, but it has a red stopper in it. "Cherry red." I picked glass shards out of my toe pads with tweezers all through the following week even though I vacuumed relentlessly. Glass shards and one single deep splinter from the back porch.

We keep our tiny herb garden on the back porch, basil and rosemary and now mint, and they're all growing like weeds except, oddly, for the mint which is supposed to basically be a literal weed. I think it's just not used to its pot yet. The others took some time to cultivate, too, anyway. The leaves smell good when you rub them between your fingers.

Work before noon is a quiet place. I don't know if it's scientists in general or scientists here, but no one seems quite on top of things until after lunch. We wander the hallways, frequent the Keurigs, cradle hot cups in our hands and murmur greetings sotto voce to each other. I'm pretty sure everyone is just doing variations on "morning", but for all I know, we could all be saying things like "I hate your guts" with tired smiles.

Doubt it, though.

My MBTA card is apparently dying. I'm unreasonably (well, I don't think it's unreasonable) irritated that the RFID is giving up one week into the month, because I don't know if I should try to ride this out and then replace the card so I don't have to revisit the MBTA DMV to have the pass transferred, or just give in and make the trip. I mean, I paid $75 for this pass and shouldn't have to sketchily jump turnstiles to get to work.

The hot weather is apparently phenomenal for fruit flies, and I'm fighting a losing battle with them, trying to keep all the fruit in the refrigerators or in closed containers, a couple of ball jars converted to mass graves with apple cider vinegar or red wine as lures. They work well, but even one or two flies is a tremendous annoyance to me. Bugs make me feel itchy and dirty.

I am not enjoying summer. I'm not longing for winter, either, with blankets and shivers. I just want some of that in-between weather. We didn't ever get any real spring weather. You'd think we were far enough north to not have miserable summers, but you would be wrong. I'm just not cut out for this climate.