Heat Wave

courtesy of evinoryan88
from Flickr

Wednesday June 20, 8:26 p.m.

You know when news shows, including CP24, start playing either "A Tropical Heat Wave" or "Hot, Hot, Hot", the temperature is gonna be hitting the high 30s Celsius. And so, I felt my first heat wave in Toronto in almost 2 decades. For a guy who was used to just feeling cold during Xmas visits to the old hometown from Japan, getting back into the heat and humidity here was interesting....and nostalgic.

I was getting this in the Kanto area every year from July to September since the mid-90s to last Summer. In a way, Japan thoroughly heatproofed me for today. Over there, walking outside in the concrete jungle of Tokyo where the heat blasting back at you from the sidewalk and glass toughened up everyone residing there. For years, I walked through seas of humidity while wearing shirt, tie, undershirt and dark slacks. Kept my energy levels up through lots of pit stops at vending machines, and ingesting eel-on-rice and cold noodles.

courtesy of Blue Lotus
from Flickr

So, getting outside after my class at the school, it didn't feel too bad at all. Generally, humidity levels in Toronto are somewhat lower than those in Tokyo. Had curry rice for dinner tonight so that should help my stamina.

But we in Canada's largest city need not feel alone obviously. 90% of Ontario is feeling our pain, and Japan's largest city has entered a pocket of high temperatures after Typhoon No. 4 swept through the area a couple of days ago. For us, though, we just have one more day of this, and then things get a lot more reasonable.

However, there is one vital difference between our situation here in the GTA and that of Tokyo. Here in Toronto, our usage of electricity is naturally up but apparently Ontario Hydro can handle it, but since last year's nuclear disaster in Fukushima, it's gonna be another wait-and-see whether TEPCO can handle the demand for air conditioning.