Picture from Pixabay. Because this is where I long to be right now.

Today is the fourth day of this summer’s first heat wave. I’m doing… not okay, but surviving and taking measures to keep hydrated and as cool as I can. Sleep is suffering a lot: I haven’t truly slept for five days… instead I’m just sort of hibernating – not asleep, but not really wake/conscious either at night. So far migraine is dealing with the lack of sleep and heat well, even though I have a hard pressure in my head almost all the time and have to take a lot of pills. Fingers crossed!

I’m very happy and relieved though that the first proper heat wave happened only the last week of June and not earlier. The first three weeks were lovely, pretty much what I like in the summer as far as weather goes – warm enough to be out in a t-shirt and thin, summery loose pants/skirt and sandals. It could’ve been a little more cloudy because that what my eyes and migraine like, but when the sun was out, it wasn’t too hot even for me as long as shade was available for any longer duration. And May was cold, so me being me, I loved that.

I really, truly was scared of the summer this year, after last year’s monster from hell. I never think about the upcoming summer during the in-between months, but I did several times this time, fearing that this summer would be another three month long monster. But so far it doesn’t look like it – last year this time, we’d already had been having the heat wave for more than a month, so this summer’s already winning!! Today’s weather forecast shows that Sunday should be only 25 degrees again (Celcius), instead of the 30-31 we’ve had now for four days and looks like will have for other four days.

Even if disaster strikes there will be a prolonged heat wave, there’s really only July left of “real summer”. Because evenings and nights in August start to get colder, even if days are still hot, so it simply can’t be as unbearable as it is now because you can cool everything down in the evening. So no bloody heat wave three month summer monster from hell this year! Yay!  

BTW – is there an English term for a heat wave that is no longer a wave? When it stays abnormally hot for an unusual number of weeks or even months?

Because in Finnish what we’re having right now is called “helle”, which is the word the “really fucking hot” and has nothing to do how long it lasts – helle just describes that the weather has passed from “kuuma” (normal hot weather, to be expected in the summer normally) to really fucking hot (to be expected of only a handful of days during summer).

So when it’s 23 degrees out we say it’s “kuuma” (hot), and when it’s above 25 degrees, we say it’s “helle” “really fucking hot”.  When “helle” lasts only for about a week at the most, we can also call it “helleaalto” (heat wave), but when it goes on and one, it’s just “helle”, no “aalto” (wave) about it.

The last several years the number of consecutive “helle” and just “helle” days in general have been increasing in number, so I’ve been wondering it’s there’s a one word term for really fucking hot in English like we do 😀 

PS. Sorry using profanity to describe in the above paragraphs- I just feel like that particular word describes my feelings about and the nature of “helle” perfectly!