Turn! Turn! Turn!

Man, I am not really a summer girl, but I sort of hate the thought of losing it. I usually love the change of seasons, but Summer Oh-Nine hasn't really felt like a mojito party on the beach. It's seemed more like a vague segue between late spring and late fall, with a handful of blisteringly hot days thrown in to confuse and dehydrate us.

I know, I know - Toronto gets an easy-breezy winter compared to places like Regina and Winnipeg. I shouldn't be bitching. I should just be thanking my lucky stars that I've never had to be one of the 6,184 souls toughing it out in Iqaluit. Blah blah blah. Toronto still gets slammed with some unpleasant precipitation. Look, we all know that Vancouver has the weeniest Canadian winter. Boo hoo, it rains a lot. But when your winters look like this instead of this, it's a mite difficult to muster up the sympathy. Even if it does rain, it's not like you're out there - y'all seem busy with other hobbies. (Stereotypical? Yes. Sue me.)

This summer was kind of lame. Sure, it had some hot days, and the nights were pleasant and cool. It's always a drag when your (read: my) apartment heats up to roughly cookie-baking temperature; it tends to make sleeping really shitty. But overall, it seemed so blah. There was the garbage strike - and thank god it wasn't hotter, or else the city would have stunk -and that meant no Canada Day fireworks or sneaking into public pools.

Officially, the rainiest summer on record was just last year. But didn't this year feel like it was sort of off-kilter? And it's almost over! It's like that joke in Annie Hall: The food here is terrible! And such small small portions!

All right, I'll stop bitching. To everything there is a season (Turn! Turn! Turn!) and summer 2010 is a scant ten months away. That'll bring the South Africa-hosted World Cup, the release of Toy Story 3 (what? I was twelve years old when the first one came out. It was awesome then, and it's awesome now), and my long-delayed graduation party (only eight years . It will also mean the end of those terrible CTV Olympics ads, which seriously can't come fast enough.

So: gods of summer. Small request. Give me a glorious Indian summer in mid-to-late October - just a few more days to sit out on the deck and watch the snow not fly - and I'll do my best to keep the moaning about the upcoming winter and this bust of a summer to my own bitter self.