Sep 17, 2008

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance” --Jane Austen My problem exactly. Ched wondered how hot it stays at night here in Hooterville. That depends on where you live in town or even if you live way out of the metro area. Many years ago, the days were hot here in the summer and the nights cooled dramatically. Then the city population exploded and we paved over the desert. Concrete and asphalt hold heat, warming the city's nighttime temps. During the summer, the nighttime temperature only drops to the high seventies or low eighties. It is not uncommon for the temperature to still be 100 at ten o'clock at night. After midnight it drops twenty degrees or so, reaching the daily low at four in the morning. In Phoenix, 90 through the summer nights is common and 100 all night is not unusual. Phoenix is much hotter than Hooterville. It is unclear whether our warming nighttime temperatures are a result of the urbanization of the city, a change in the way the weather service records the temperatures or global warming in general. It is likely a bit of each. We also don't have seasons in the traditional sense. The old joke is that we have only two. Grass is green, sky is blue and grass is brown, sky is blue. We enjoy 350 days per year of blue skies. November through March are nearly perfect weather, highs in the 65 to 70 range and lows between 35 and 55. October, April and May are pleasant, but June, July, August and September can be horrible, with July and August always miserable. Get this. Our current ten-day forecast calls for temps in the mid to high 90's through the end of the month. Think about that, 95 degrees on Halloween. It's no wonder I'm nuts. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky

7 comments:

Reya Mellicker said...

Yikes! Poor little Sneedlets will be roasting in their costumes.

What ya'll have on that side of the Rockies that we don't have is dry air. It rarely gets that hot in DC, but the humidity is truly awful. It is a swamp so I shouldn't complain.

Glad you got your new A/C!!

bitchlet said...

That must be it.

It's the grey skies that push me over the edge.

Bobby D. said...

But it's a dry heat, right?
That's what everyone always says, but I was in Las Vegas visiting my aunt during a week where it stayed around 110 except for one day when it hit 116. Dry heat okay, but I felt like the dried out husk of a person walking here and there, stopping often for water and A/C. Most of the time I stayed indoors.

I do love air conditioning. Great invention.

Nan Patience said...

Whoa! Now that's hot. And it's always like that? No seasons? Wow.

Steve Reed said...

As Ched said, a/c is a great invention. But then again, if there were no a/c, probably far fewer people would be living in Hooterville (and in Florida and Southern California and all across the Sun Belt). Which means our rust belt cities would not be quite so rusty and the country's northern tier would be in better economic shape. Hmmmm...food for thought.

Anyway, I love the desert, but maybe only to visit.

Kurt said...

I think I would miss rainstorms, fog etc.

Inclement weather is also an excuse to watch movies during the day. If it's sunny out, it feels wrong to watch TV.

Squirrel said...

Kurt is so right.

I remember trick or treating in over a foot of snow--and me in my thin Martian costume.