Cold, miserable, raining, midwinter afternoon, but thanks for asking.

Today it was 110. Tonight has a low of 82. Right now, it feels like 90-95 or so. The projected low of 82 won't come until just an hour or three before dawn. Tommorow it's supposed to be 111. A few days ago it was 115 or so. And it's only going to get hotter.

Pass me a blanket dg.

So hot, the ink dries before it touches the paper.

This should all go a long ways to explaining why I'm still completely naked.

Stinkin' hot here (though after loquacious, the rest of us just come off as whiners). 84F at 9am. It was in the mid 90s yesterday... I think I'm going to have to resort to the AC today.

And loquacious, that's just nasty. Is that typical for this time of year?

I hear it's actually a few degrees cooler than average. It must be my half-assed mutant powers keeping it down.

But, yeah, it's been consistently hotter than 100 degrees since about late April, with a few groups of days threatening to hit 120ish. Phoenix has to be the most aptly named city, ever.

I've lived in real, deep desert before, but that was the Mojave in inland Southern California. There I was in the boonies, and the Mojave tends to cool off more at night, it seems.

Here, I'm now in an (more or less, sprawling) urban environment in the Sonoran desert, several hundreds of miles from the nearest sea to moderate the temperature. Not only does the Sonoran seem to not cool off as much at night, but there's also the dreaded 'heat island' effect from all the structures, concrete, asphalt, and constantly running air conditioners.

Needless to say I haven't been going outside as much as I normally would like to. It's like some sort of bizarro-Antartica. Modern life doesn't exist here without complex life support systems. I try going for bike rides in the early morning, and it's already way too hot. Heat exposure, heat stroke and dehydration is a very real and constant concern. I can go through a gallon of water in the space of a few hours if I'm outside getting exercise.

And I was already fairly well adapted to heat and deserts. We've already had a handful of heat exposure deaths this year. A few days ago some able-bodied and supposedly experienced 70 yo woman went missing, and they eventually found her sitting up against a tree with an empty water bottle, a few yards from a road.

Another point to consider: If you're elderly, disabled or ill, the two major electric companies here cannot legally shut off your power, regardless of how much money you owe them. That's how important having real AC is here. Not a swamp cooler, not a couple of Wal-Mart fans. Either full central AC or a well insulated room with a beefy window unit.

But it's not all terrible. It's pretty. The skies are gorgeous, the weather is weird and interesting and intense when there's actually weather. Almost everything here is brand spankin' new, but there's almost as much Western history here as there is anywhere in the States.

And they have these totally *ginormous* service stations called "QuikTrips" or QTs where not only are there like 40 gas pumps, but inside in the ice-cold air conditioning they have these insanely complicated and elaborate self-serve cold drink fountains that dispense everything from frozen coffee, to shakes, slushies, smoothies, frozen sports drinks, plus your run of the mill fountain sodas and lemonades and stuff. And they always have your choice of crushed or regular ice. They actively encourage mixing and matching, and even publish weird little recipe booklets. And it's cheap, especially if you save your cup and get it as a refill. The whole thing is rather weird. And almost everyone goes to a QT on a regular basis if they drive around at all.

I'm totally not a fan of hyper-sugared beverages, but I'll be damned if there's anything even remotely like filling up a sturdy plastic 44 oz cup full of icy-cold slushie mix, right up to the top of the plastic dome lid and plunking it down right between your legs in the car on a really hot day. On my first trip to a QT it was 117 or something, and I drank that thing in *minutes*, fighting off near-fatal brain freeze the whole way.

i thought i heard Phoenix was supposed to be essentially flawed with the way the city was made, all the concrete and such absorbing the heat.
which makes one think there should be something using all that damn heat.

Atlanta had times of extreme windiness from the ways the streets are set up.

Per the thermometer outside my window, it's a sweet 53 degrees. Add a light sprinkle cleverly disguised as heavy fog and you've got summer in San Francisco.

Oh, and, you better bet I'm naked and loving it.

On preview: loquacious, you're easily my favorote poster, but I not-so-secretly think you're an alien. A very articulate, funnier than shit alien.

Where'd you grow up loquacious?

(we have the heater on here -- probably about 55degF today -- and, although it is winter, I can still tolerate outside in shorts in the day if I'm a bit active)

[That should read 'favorite' but your brain freeze powers over took me for a moment.]

OWOWOWOWOW!

it's fingohypnotism
i swear he's been getting me as long as it took him to type it

Whew! Eth, I feel so much better knowing I'm not the only one.

If I had a gun I would kill the sun.

/humidex

i will pay you


i hate that fireball in the sky
sometimes
and any hint of tan which would be called fleshtone on most of you lot does nothing for my color palette

and the bugs, make the bugs go away

keep the heat lightning though
but just for looks

we may all have to join super powers for that one

Excuse me? Fingohypnotism? *looks befuddled*

I grew up in the suburban wasteland of Orange County, California, that purveyor of destructively bored youth, surf culture, punk-pop and a gazillion useless fashion trends. I spent as much time as possible in LA, which I found deliciously frightening at first. I also spent a lot of time in the local deserts and mountains.

In retrospect I wish I grew up there instead of 'behind the Orange Curtain', but there's probably something to be said about cultural famine inspiring something or other. (Despite all known symptoms of cultural sterility in LA, there's plenty of it there. It's just widely dispersed.)

Phoenix seems to be fairly well planned despite the fact it was built in what appears to be hell. The traffic isn't terrible, though the sprawl is getting way out of control. It could seriously use a light rail system, but it faces the same problems LA does with its geographic vastness.

As for the concrete, I don't think that the aldebo of concrete is vastly different then the surrounding hard-packed alluvial flats and sparse desert grasslands. It's going to be hot here no matter what. I'd love to have a nice, thick adobe or rammed-earth house out here, but concrete is a decent substitute - though my apartment is old stucco on wood.

I absofuckinglutely love the fog in SF and Central/Northern California. So mysterious, even decadent. The whole coastline of California from just north of Santa Barbara almost all the way to the border of Oregon is awesome, but the Central coasts would have to be my favorite. Too bad there's a fucking huge air force base squandering most of it.

The lightning out here is intense. We had a few pre-monsoon mostly dry thunderstorms roll through a few days ago and I couldn't help but sit on the porch smoking and just watching the sky light up all kinds of weird colors. Even though I totally know I'm eventually going to be struck by lightning one day, suffer through a painful recovery and gain weird powers.

(Actually, I met someone that was struck once, and she couldn't go near most electronics thereafter. Stuff would just break all the time around her. That would be terrible. At least to me. I can't even imagine it.)

Oh, blatant desert-related self-link: Sleeps with Coyotes

I guess everywhere has its good and its bad. But growing up with the surf and sun is decidedly good.

You mention Sonora - did you see my post about the secret german airships from 1850's a couple of weeks ago? MeFi is sick at the mo' so no linky. It was pretty surreal though.

The surf was awesome. Dude. I was taught to swim by being chucked off the end of a rock jetty into 4 foot swells. I've bodysurfed the infamous Wedge in 20 foot overhead hurricane swells. I've shot the pier at Huntington Beach, and made it. And missed, too. Ow. Barnacles and mussels are tough.

The cops and rich bastard kids sucked, though, as did the absolute wasteland of any sort of thought, original or not. Luckily I found and grew up with a small posse of smart kids, otherwise I probably wouldn't even be here today. Didn't mean to sound too bitter, I am thankful, but there's something especially disheartening about facades and the status quo in a place like that. It could be worse, I guess, I could have grown up in The Valley. Gag me with a spoon.

I'm happy growing up at my local beach wasn't tainted with such umm a dichotomy. There's something like 20 or 30 different beaches just in Sydney alone, all with their own personality and breaks and dangers. I love it to death. I was living up in Hanoi there for a while and that was the furthest I've lived away from a beach all my life - very very strange.
Even in winter now I go down (about 3 miles away) at least once a week for a walk if not a bodybash. The salt air is addictive I reckon.

There is something addictively philosophical about beach life, especially growing up in it. Something about the birthplace of life, the penetrations and permutations of membranes, a sort of real and metaphoric contact with the rest of the world all at once - via trade, via shared waters, via that ribbon of indefinable shoreline strung all around the world. 'How long is England's coastline?' How long is the world's coastline? The storms off your coasts, especially the ones out past New Zealand, made the killer, long, rolling south-southwest swells that we waited eagerly for.

I remember going body surfing once, and one time only, after taking some mushrooms and just having this overwhelming epiphany about how undeniably alive and inherently nurturing the ocean was. It was something I had always known - and not just in a textbook sense, but never quite experienced like that. Like some strange womb, filled all at once with nature, violence and nurturing.

I've lived away from oceans before. Honestly, I haven't even been in the ocean in a while. I think I went last year, but I didn't really go out, and before that it had been a few years. I felt like a tourist body-whomping in the shore break. Feeling foreign that it felt foreign at all.

Somewhere growing up I screwed up my ears, too many times getting pounded by the lip or something. "Surfer's ear" my family doctor called it. "It looks like your ears have been sandblasted." I can still hear just fine, but I'm prone to ear infections. And unfortunately almost all of the beaches around LA and Southern California are pretty badly polluted, so I started to get a lot of ear infections.

But I do miss it. Fortunately as I got older really nice concrete skateparks started making a comeback, and though I haven't skated one in a while, it's nice to know that my board, helmet and pads are literally right over there and that I could go ride and get that feeling back at any time, and now almost anywhere in the States. But it's still not quite the same.

"It's hot. It's like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot."

you don't come back from redondo beach

I'm in Buffalo, NY.
We've beat the ten year record high this week. Not for the day, either. Hottest day ever records. Beat it Monday, then beat that Tuesday. It's been in the 90s for the last week or so. According to the indoor/outdoor thermometer I have in my kitchen it crept up to 105 during the weekend.

I'm nervous as hell since, whenever we have a really crazy hot summer, we get hit with massive storms in the winter since the lake gets too warm to properly freeze.

Today it shouldn't get above the high 80s. Or so they say. If I wanted temperatures like this I certainly wouldn't be living in Buffalo!

We're only 31 (88)here in the cap city, but the humidity is killing me. We'll regularly reach 40 (104) in my home town but it was desert heat -- dry with the sun beating down. (it also goes to -40 (-40 -- hey!) there, so as you can imagine, all the pavement is cracked to no end) This feels more like Bangkok.

It's hotter'n balls in NYC, and the air is all soupy. But the office has the AC up too high, so I'm shivering. My body is very confused.

I live in a rain forest and it's still raining more than usual - almost every day for months. It gets up to the low 80s some days - we have had one or two days of high 80s - but then the rain comes. And my garden is going crazy. So I'm giving away zucchini, cilantro & basil today - anyone want some? I had a friend from my old job come over this morning & take a bushel basket to work with her.

and i coulda make a mess'o pesto
life is so unfair
i obviously need to sleep it off

what jon said--we've got August weather early--ugh.

kelly, it's weird that it's just as hot for you too--you should be cooler than us.

Loquacious, where in OC? I'm from Irvine.

NWS says it's only supposed to get up to 85 today, which is a blessing.

It will hit 100 today in SW Missouri, about 70% humidity. Not a drop of rain in about ten days, but when it does let loose, we have enormous window-rattling thunderstorms that drop lightning bolts like so much parade candy. On days like today it is bearable outside until about 10 a.m. To cool off the boy and I go to a local river and wade around. It is a little on the slimy side, but that makes for slippery rocks and he enjoys letting the current push him along over them. On the weekend we head down to the Ozarks and enjoy the many many cool clear rivers and springs.

Hotter than The Human Torch's asshole at a chili cookoff.

Hotter than the devil's armpits.

Hotter than the sales of workboots, knitting supplies cat food and 'D' batteries the week the lesbian convention's in town.

Hotter than a behavioural scientist's monkey what just worked for six hours onlt to find out it was a plastic bannana.

It was 105 yesterday with 70% humidity. The low, in the middle of the night, was about 81. I apparently built a house in the 5th circle of hell. Bleh. Also, we're having "Red" pollution alerts. Living downwind of Dallas is such pleasant experience in the summer...

...dreamsign, 30+ C, 100% humidity and it's still to chilly for the visitors from Singapore and southern China.

81 degrees F here in Boston. The air is irritatingly wet, and has been for a couple weeks now. I demand the 70-degree balminess I was promised back in the depths of our endless New England winter.

This whole global warming, heavy weather thing is bullshit clearly (not like false or not happening, but bullshit, like global warming you are such a dick!), we had no real spring in NYC, then it is in fact hotter than balls, stormy, swampy and awful. You get covered with gritty schmutz just going outside, when you go inside (as jonmc says) and there is AC your body goes into shock and you get a strange little micro-fever and then when you go outside again it's like getting a huge face in the armpit power noogie from the fattest, most shower averse Hells Angel ever.

The thing that gets me, however, is the subway, especially the canal st N/Q stop, it smells like hot vomit down there, from some kind of super mold that can't be killed because the same chinatown fishjuice/McDonalds garbage runoff has been leaking into the same spot for the last 12 years and the air is just trapped in the tunnels, fermenting and feculating till a train comes and then this ill fetid assey wind gets pushed into your lungs, a wind that promises nothing good.

The thing that gets me, however, is the subway, especially the canal st N/Q stop, it smells like hot vomit down there,

The area around the Ditmars platform ain't no nasal mardi gras either. Every bum in Queens County seems to have chosen it as his personal pissing spot, which combines with the heat for a wonerfully bracing urine-sauna effect in the morning.

MetaChat: Ain't no nasal Mardi Gras.

Though, I can't imagine Mardi Gras being a particularly apt reference. Mardi Gras in New Orleans itself probably smells worse than a wet goat-dog dragged through a cess-pool of stale beer and piss then lit on fire.

"Such a bouf!" /Robbins

Oh, and

kenko: Ahh, Irvine. The beige belly of the beast. I grew up between Huntington Beach and weekend visits to Costa Mesa/Newport. I just moved out of a temporary guest stay at a housing development that was so beige, colorless and lifeless it made me wistfully wish for the relative color of Irvine.

peacay: Re: Diridgibles. MeFi's back. Linky?

Remember: it's not the heat; it's the humidity. ; >

(it really is tho, for us here)

Enough with the heat. Can't we go back to talking about nudity?

I'm from the same town as loquacious. Only they totally ruined it, and now it's worse than it was when I was a kid. I escaped and went to New York. They ruined that too, but I'm not as attached.

Hot piss fumes, frat boys vomiting onto each other,tits, beads, half digested oysters, paralytic drunks slipping and sliding around, leering pennypinching perverts with disposable cameras taking out of focus no flash pictures of sagging boobs from three inches away, it's all out-takes from the Satyricon, Fellini all saying, no, no too depraved, no one will understand.

Such a strange city, New Orleans. I was there this weekend helping moms move and it was so hot that as I was installing security gates on her windows (kinda iffy neighborhood she moved to) sweat was pouring off my forehead and dropping into the motor of the cordless drill and sparking and making hot electricity smells.

Jon,
I know that Ditmars stop, it is indeed like having to wear Ging George III's favorite pair of party breeches snugly pulled over your face for a day.

Now, that I've finished reading the rest of the thread: locquacious, you would be suprised what wusses about the ocean some people out here are. There'll be two foot waves and the water will be seventy, and people will whine, I swear. So I tell them about getting my ass kicked from being too small to dive through the waves, and how sixty-eight was warm dammit! warm! Hee, being crotchety is fun.


(Peacay, the ocean is the *only* good thing about the OC. And even that can be ruined by crazy Christians standing around on Main Street, trying to convince you you are going to hell.)

Sticky as hell in NYC. It's not the heat it's the moisture content of the atmosphere.

I know that Ditmars stop, it is indeed like having to wear Ging George III's favorite pair of party breeches snugly pulled over your face for a day.

Which is weird since Ditmars Village is a fairly family-oriented, well-kept-up area for the most part, but we got an awful lot of bums around for some reason: the filthy dude with the long hair, beard and beatific expression that makes him look like a crossbreed of Ted Nugent and Mahatma Ghandi (he also speaks fluent Greek); blind ghetto-blaster guy by the bank; the toothless deaf/mute black guy who makes smoking gestures everytime I pass until I give him one; the guy with the bum legs who likes to sing old show tunes off key in the subway; the Blind Balkan Accordion Guy, and of course good old Lloyd the fingerless crackhead basketball coach.

Well, I went out for a walk by the sea shortly after I posted here, and it was much cooler (still morning), but by the time I came back it was hot-hot-hot, so I am indeed doing the happy AC thing, and just woke up from a lovely sweat-free nap. And now I think it's time for a nice iced coffee.

and they had record heat again in France, Italy and Spain, i heard.

Turned the electric blanket on about half an hour ago. Going to make a hot chocolate and go and snuggle down under the Doona. It's 5 degrees celsius here. Night all.

Bloody show offs.

Blind Balkan Accordion Guy

I love that guy! (does impression that no one can see or hear).

It's 88 degrees and humid as all get-out in Chicago. It's wreaking havoc on my hair...good thing I am getting it cut tonight.

The AC in my office is cranked up too and I've had to put my fleece on a couple times.

High of 19c (70F-ish) here (Greater Vancouver area) today. Humid though, bleh. Is there anywhere that's cool and dry?!

Born in Newport Beach, CA (didn't know there were so many SoCal'ers here) and raised in the armpit of OC - Santa Ana. Lived various places in SoCal 'til 27 and then escaped to ... Texas! Nothing, but nothing beats Houston for heat and humidity. Try 90F and 90% humidity. You were never dry. Never, ever.

locquacious - I've been to Phoenix multiple times in the summer (younger bro lives there). Why that city was ever built I'll never know.

It ain't the heat, it's the humility. (Virginia) Still and all, Summer seems to me the true, right and good state of weather. I hate the freaking cold.

It's Seattle-like here in Seattle. Although a bit warmer today than the last few days (in the 70's, and kind of muggy).

OH! Matildaben, where in Seattle do you live? I live on Cap Hill for 10 years. Miss that town sometimes.

Windy and wet down here

74F and perfect here on San Francisco Bay. BWAHAHAHAHA!