It's been a hot summer. How hot? So far this summer, folks inside the Beltway have experienced 1159 cooling degree days. That figure doesn't mean much, unless you know that during an average summer, we would have experienced only 790 cooling degree days at this point. And last summer, that blissful July when we were able to keep the windows open almost all month, we had experienced only 666 cooling degree days as of July 25th.

So, yeah, it's been hot. It only got up to 99 today, with thunderstorms. After the rain delay, we played some baseball in the street. My shirt was completely soaked after about five minutes.

Hot, hot, hot. Almost every day in July has had a high of over 90. More than half of June had the same. We're very close to the local record for 90+ days in a year, and we haven't even gotten to August.

Coastal heat isn't as bad as midcontinental heat, though. The oceans moderate the extremes. Summers in Kansas and Missouri were routinely worse than the one I'm experiencing. I guess I'm getting old.

I particularly remember the summer of 1980. I spent the last couple weeks of June at Boy Scout camp, and the highlight of every breakfast was the description of the latest Royals victory and our commanding lead in the standings. That fall, of course, we swept the hated Yankees in the playoffs and played in our first World Series.

Those were the days.

But 1980 was also ungodly hot. I believe that Kansas City had something like 30 straight days above 100. Dallas had something like the 60-70 days of consecutive triple-digit days. The midwest baked to a hard crust that summer. I slept on the third floor of an unairconditioned house. It was hot, though my fan and the attic fan (one of those monster three-footers) kept it manageable. And anyway, who could go to sleep before Dan Quisenberry put the finishing touches on yet another Royals victory? By ten or ten-thirty, temperatures would have gotten down below 90, and that was manageable. Mostly.

On the other hand, memories of that summer convinced me that every house where I lived should have A/C. My wife and I have bought two houses over the years, both of which did not have central air-conditioning. We paid good money to install efficient systems, and so our power bills were much lower than those we would have had with window units.

But regardless of the efficiency or cost of power bills, we were going to have A/C. I am not going through another 1980.

This summer, I've programmed the thermostat to let temperatures rise higher than normal. I've never been a 72-degrees kinda guy (in winter or summer), but the daytime temp is set to 82, which can be a tad warm. But, you know, we're trying to cut costs.

But there's no cutting costs when the summer is 50 percent warmer than normal in terms of cooling needs. We can mitigate things somewhat, but we're gonna pay in the end. There's no way around it.

I'm a winter guy. Snow is awesome. Ice is a challenge. A bitter wind is a friend of mine (for a few minutes, anyway). This hot stuff absolutely goes against my character. I'm sure we're just paying for the record snows of last winter (which were caused, oddly enough, by a warmer than usual season), but I'm ready for break. It's not August yet, but something's gotta give. There's nothing left to melt.

Thanks for letting me complain. Next week, I promise I'll write about something important, like Sarah Palin's days as a Sig Ep little sister at the University of Idaho.

Jon Worley is pleased to see that the forecast high for D.C. will drop below 90 by Friday. Maybe.