The Yard Days of Summer

It’s July, which means for many parts of the world, it’s hot as hell right now. 75 degrees ain’t always 75 degrees, if humidity has anything to say about it. Your solution to the heat might be huddling in the AC with a video game, or heading to the beach. We all deal with summer—with seasons, really—in different ways. But summer and winter, the most extreme of the seasons, are different beasts.

Which got Rob and Patrick thinking about summer itself, and how their relationship has changed with it not only over the years, but the decades. Summer as a kid is not summer as an adult. Hell, it’s not the same as summer as a teenager. It’s only three months, but a long three months.

For some, it stirs memories of endless hours on summer break, doing whatever you please. For others, it’s toiling in the yard, whether under the lax supervision of parents vainly attempting a new project or playing soldier in the background. You might be able to guess who did the last one.

In any case, summer. It's just a season, Michael. How hot could it get?

Patrick: Hey Rob, it’s early July. One of the first exchanges you and I had since coming back from the holiday break was about the heat. (It’s okay here right now, sounds like it’s worse by you?) Growing up in the Midwest, I’m used to rapidfire weather changes, and broadly, the heat does not bother me. Humidity sucks, don’t get me wrong, but I think a lot of my indifference—or learned acceptance—has to do with growing up around a pool or lake during huge parts of my life. I associate the warm weather, ironically, with cooling off. I could spend all day in the water, and as we talked about on the HOA podcast this week, chasing that feeling was a huge part of why I poured so much time and effort into getting an above ground pool into our yard this year. 

Yet, when I think back about some of my fondest memories with video games, it’s the summer, especially those years before I was gently—and then more forcibly—encouraged to get a job during those months between school years. It was an opportunity to fully and completely indulge, which is what led me to seeing how far the in-game clock for Final Fantasy VII will keep ticking up and up. For the record, it’s 99 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds, and then you’re on your own. I’m pretty sure I hit that moment while grinding a goofy chocobo mini-game that helped you uncover an ultra-powerful spell in the game, a summon called Knights of the Round. 

Knights of the Round was, in fact, sick as hell. Worth it? Who can say. I was a kid, long before I stumbled into the person I am today, who spends too much time trying to be efficient with time. But I miss those days where I’d just give myself over to a game, usually an RPG, and stay up until the wee hours of the morning, because I didn’t have to get out of bed until closer to noon.

There was a rhythm to those days, as lackadaisical as they were. When I couldn’t escape from the heat in a giant vat of water, I would escape from the heat inside with a stack of video games.

Now, I associate summer with being out of sync. With two kids and thus, an increasing pool of social obligations, my summer weekends are booked before May ends. This summer has been particularly out of sync, because I was out of town three weekends in a row—Summer Game Fest, then a funeral, and finally our big in-person stream—and now I’m pairing a Remap company break around July 4th with a family vacation soon after. One third of the summer has already passed by, but it barely feels like I’ve found my footing in one of my favorite seasons.

The one constant, though, has been my Steam Deck. I know this device is only a few years old, but it’s genuinely hard to imagine my life without it at this point. At least, it’s hard to untangle my relationship with video games without the Steam Deck, because it’s become my summer out of sync device. If I’m on an airplane, I can pull out the Steam Deck. If I’m in a hotel, I can pull out the Steam Deck. If I’m at a gymnastics practice for one of my kids, I can—well, you get the idea. 

I feel like it helps me have one foot in one world, while I’m existing in another.

It may seem like a goofy frustration to express, but part of my adoration of the Midwest—and I’m sure this is true for you on the East Coast—is shifting behaviors in the direction of the seasonal changes. There are only certain things you do, or eat, or play, during parts of the year, and especially when fall and spring are so fleeting, time to make good on those can be precious.

What’s your relationship with the summer months, and how’s that changed over the years?

Rob: I used to really hate the heat, so summer was always my least favorite season. I think part of my hatred, though, was the fact my parents loved to press me into helping with yardwork and home maintenance projects that were always murderously boring and actively miserable in the heat. “Go weed underneath the bushes,” they’d tell me, handing me a bucket and a trowel and gesturing at a forty-yard line of vine-invested shrubs that wrapped around part of our lawn. They’d be stunned how long it was taking me, then they’d show me how they would have done it, and I realized that usually it was because they were doing a bad job, missing most of the new shoots of weeds erupting in the topsoil, which is probably why the weeds were thriving more than the bushes. 

Later, the demands for me to do yardwork were replaced by demands I go get a summer job, which I must admit did give me a lot of valuable experiences and exposure to jobs and types of people I might not otherwise have encountered, but is also what led me to taking up smoking. It was also when I began to suspect that my parents no longer really knew how the world worked, perplexed as they were by the fact that simply walking to various shops or cold-calling businesses in the Yellow Pages and politely asking if they needed help did not immediately yield gainful employment.