Late June, the National Weather Service put out a Code Red heat advisory for the Pittsburgh area. Near triple digits. They said stay inside, keep the AC running, don’t do anything you don’t have to do. I read this notice on my phone at about seven-thirty in the morning, nodded to myself, and then looked at Biscuit, who was at the back door in the particular way she stands when she needs to go out and has been patient about it long enough.
So we went out.
The air was thick before we even got to the sidewalk. The kind of heat that doesn’t feel like hot air so much as something with weight to it. I’ve lived outside Pittsburgh my whole life and I know August, but late June does not usually feel like this. This felt like something decided to skip ahead a couple of months and nobody got the memo.
We made it about half a block before Biscuit sat down. Just sat down, right there on the sidewalk, looked up at me, and made it very clear that this was as far as she was going. She wasn’t distressed — no panting, no signs of anything serious — just a very composed yellow Labrador communicating, in the way she communicates, that the terms of this walk had changed and she was exercising her right to renegotiate.
I respect that about her, actually. She knows when something isn’t worth it.
Rusty, for his part, had not received the memo about the heat and appeared to be operating in a completely different reality. He was at the end of the leash pulling toward something only he could smell, fully unbothered, tail up, entirely unaware that it was nearly a hundred degrees and we were all supposed to be somewhere air-conditioned. That’s beagles, I suppose. Rusty treats most obstacles, including extreme weather, as roughly equivalent to mildly interesting. The nose takes over and the rest of the world gets filtered out.
We did maybe ten minutes of walking before I made the executive decision to turn around. Biscuit was relieved. Rusty was indifferent in the way that beagles are indifferent to anything that isn’t a scent worth following.
Back inside, I got the AC running properly and watched the electric bill start its climb in real time. It ran all day. I don’t want to know the final number. I know roughly what it is and I’ve decided to leave it at roughly.
The heat broke around July 5th — or rather, it collapsed into something worse, which was the flash flooding that came through after, but I’ll write about that separately. The point is the summer of 2026 has not been subtle about anything. A hundred degrees and then a record flood, and in between some of the most slippy weather I can remember, where you’d step outside and have no idea which version of the summer you were getting that day.
Whether that’s the new normal or just a bad stretch I honestly don’t know. I’m sixty-three, and summers feel hotter than they used to, but sixty-three-year-old men have been saying that for as long as there have been sixty-three-year-old men, so I’m not sure how much weight to put on my own impression of it.
What I know is: Biscuit was right, I should have listened to her, and next time there’s a Code Red advisory I’m not going past the end of the driveway.
The dogs are fine, for the record. Biscuit had a long nap, Rusty found something under the couch to chew on, and the rest of the day was uneventful.
A thought on what came after the heat, since it was almost worse:
The flooding on July 5th was something else entirely. Four inches of rain in an hour in some parts of western Pennsylvania. The official number at Pittsburgh International was a daily rainfall record. I had water in the basement — not a disaster, maybe two inches, but enough that I spent a Saturday morning with a shop vac and an attitude. Rusty found something in the backyard that the water had apparently moved there from somewhere else, and whatever it was he was extremely interested in it, and I was extremely interested in getting him away from it, and we went back and forth on that for about ten minutes before I won. The heat and then the flood, within about a week of each other. I have lived outside Pittsburgh for sixty-three years and I cannot remember a June and July that felt quite like this one. Hot, then sideways, then wet. The summer did not ease into anything. It just kept arriving.
That’s all for this one.
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Hey, thanks for stopping by. This is just a place where I write about everything I’ve tried lately: old watches, the dogs, movies, interesting sports games, and any new app or website that catches my eye. Just one guy’s take, nothing more
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