Meteorological summer precedes astronomical summer by a month or so. I don't think it behooves a human with full cognitive capacities to trust anything to fickle as weather or as indifferent as the laws of planetary motion to mark time for us. Time is a fixed resource; keep your eye one it. You should really decide for yourself what counts as summer.
I'm swiftly approaching a decade free from the schedules of academia, so the end of classes have slowly been supplanted by other, softer signs that the few odd weeks of blackening, then disappearing snow banks we dubiously refer to as “springtime” in these latitudes have given way to summer, full fledged and irrefutable.
There's a smell you only get when rain falls on hot pavement. I smelled that for the first time this year a couple days ago, while I was stopped to buy a 12-pack of domestic beer to bring to a party where I didn't really know anyone, but the invitation contained the phrase “100 hot dogs”, so what was I going to do?
So, yeah. It's summer now. Who wants to help me put up a hammock?
