Hot Enough To …
Okay, I feel bad for a lot of y’all because it’s gonna get hot where you are. You know, Texas hot.
Hot enough to melt dirt.
So hot we had to feed the chickens crushed ice to keep them from laying hard boiled eggs.
Hot as high school love.
So hot that potatoes are baking in the ground.
So hot that you need pot holders to turn your steering wheel.
That hot.
So, here’s some clues from a girl who knows hot.
Go right now and have them install a swimming pool or a creek in you backyard. If that’s impossible, buy one of those kiddie pools. Sit in it while holding an umbrella with a big ole fan on you.
Drink about the same amount of water it takes to fill the swimming pool everyday.
Ice cream.
Fill your cooler with ice. When you can’t take it anymore, stick your head in it.
Volunteer to work at the Costco frozen food department.
Do not shop – stores can’t keep up with the heat. And if there’s a power failure, which is likely, nobody has cash to pay but that’s okay because none of the store clerks know how to make change.
They say eating hot food will make you feel cooler. They lie.
White Trash Swimming Pool: Fill an empty 5 gal. paint bucket with cold water, stand in the back yard (in your underwear), dump the whole thing on your head.
1Hotter than the hinges of Hell
Hotter than Billy be dammed
2Sea level rise means your backyard might become a swimming pool.
3God provides, see?
Parking spaces in TX are sought by amount of shade, not proximity to entrance.
4Not just Texas, Mike. Washington State parking spaces are sought for the same reason these days. Those trees just don’t grow fast enough.
5I live within walking distance of a Safeway, a Harris Teeter, and an organic specialty store and I have something similar to this:
https://www.amazon.com/Wellmax-WM99024S-Shopping-Collapsible-Portable/dp/B071NL7BG8?ref_=fsclp_pl_dp_2
But, in this kind of heat, I gave up and rented a Zip Car for an hour and a half and drove to the Harris Teeter. The way home is up a rather steep block and there was no way I was gonna haul that cart up that hill in this mess. I bought enough food to last until the weather breaks next Monday.
I must be getting old.
6Or you could head to coastal Oregon, where I am for a week. It’s mid-60s today, heavily overcast and drizzling off and on.
Oh, and windy.
It seems whenever we travel in the RV, we have choices of too cold or too hot, and rarely in any nice middle range.
7Meanwhile, it’s 72 here near Superior with a nice breeze off the lake.
8Yeah, it’s supposed to get all the way up to 72 here in southcentral Alaska, scattered showers this afternoon, possible evening thunderstorms. I’m not sure we can handle the heat.
9So hot that campers at the state park reported a snake crawling into the fire pit just so it could catch some shade from the skillet.
10But will it be too hot to play golf?
11JDM @7,
12A couple of my kids just did a PCS to a coastal Oregon military station for the next few years. A very major climate attitude adjustment is in progress [they thought SFO was cold and wet a few tours back].
Born and raised in our Deep South Texas heat, they just left a tour in steamy SW Florida.
Their current OR temperature today is 63degF w/rain&fog @12:38 pm PDT [it might get to 65deg for the high]. It’s been in the 50-60’s since they got there at the start of ‘summer’.
Another aspect of military service most people never consider, the general weather differences of moving around [diff clothing, housing, food, driving conditions, etc]. Even the [grand]kids have to make adjustments: they really liked seeing alligators, ain’t no gators in Oregon [we have gators here too].
.
Meanwhile, here in S TX, the heat rolls on, yet another week of near 100deg days, ~80deg night lows, with dripping wet 75-82deg dewpoints [we sometimes are in the 90s in January].
The only break has been occasional storm systems. The last one over the weekend was the tail of Hurricane Barry, some of the most intense lightning I’ve ever seen, and a four hour power outage; it did cool off for a while though, highs only ~94deg a couple of days, ahhh, so cool.
.
Sam in Superior & slipstream, send some of that 70deg stuff down here, puuleeez.
Actually, for anyone thinking of a trip to coastal Oregon* the weather is generally better – often warmer and less windy – in Sept compared to July or August.
* Oregon has some of the greatest walking beaches anywhere. Flat, long (10-20 miles long enough?) and scenic. The weather is what keeps it from being super crowded, in fact it’s seldom crowded at all anywhere.
13It is supposed to go down to 58 tonight, I’m not kidding.
14And Sat is supposed to be 93.
Weird weather this summer up here!
Damn, those Chinese hoaxsters are really good, aren’t they?
Longer term, it will get even worse. Here’s a nice interactive map from the Union of Concerned Scientists (AKA in Trumpland as “fake scientists”):
https://ucsusa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=e4e9082a1ec343c794d27f3e12dd006d
The tl;dr version: we’re cooked, and it’s our own damned fault.
15Fran,
16My dear Dad (now 98 with advanced dementia) used say silly things to make us laugh. “Hot as the hinges of binges!” he’d say.
“They say eating hot food will make you feel cooler.”
Nah. But for some people it will make you feel better.
For me, those days are lost in acid reflux…
17@The Surly Professor #15–Thanks for the link. Very interesting and yes, we are cooked.
18I have a creek installed, some millenia back, in my backyard. A really big creek. Suddenly I have become suddenly very popular, even with my conservative friends. Well, especially with my conserative friends…especially with my conservative friends with whom I am not particularly friendly. What’s up wth that?
19A heat wave that will probably drive people to the beaches during Shark Week.
20Obviously just another wrinkle in that neferous chinese hoax.
I would like to know why it isn’t hot enough to melt fat off my thighs.
21Oregon has its fair share of miserable hot too, and it’s happening more and longer. The talking heads have convinced the newly relocated to regard warm, cloudless weather as “good weather” and cloudy, rainy weather as “bad weather”. There once were four seasons in Oregon, now there are two: 1 unseasonable and 2 unusual.
22Davester, Oregon, the PNW, and AK are getting warmer, and losing precip, faster than US lower latitudes. Climate change is acting stronger on the higher latitudes, particularly above the Arctic Circle. Which is mostly hidden from most people. That’s what makes it so dangerous, and relatively easy for the ‘climate deniers’ to obscure.
23.
Beyond that, my “newly relocated” kids are still at heart, South Texans; and now living in a more ‘unique’ part of Oregon, almost surrounded by water with the Pacific on one side.
It sure beats going to Alaska though [had to PCS due to promotions, that’s how the mil often works].
The temperatures there, according to the town’s Wiki page, has their monthly ‘average high temps’ as only 69deg in Aug/Sep, with the ‘mean max temp’ at 82deg for those months [yearly high months].
That’s chilly year-around. It does sometimes get hotter of course. It only got to 63deg today there, with rain all day, brrrr.
To the folks who don’t deal with these kinds of heat indexes on a regular basis, please take care. For my part, early summer is worse than late summer because I have to get acclimated to it again every year, and by August, even though it’s technically worse, I’m able to deal with it much better.
24The most important thing to remember if you have to spend time in the heat with high humidity is to do your best to stay shaded and ventilated as much as possible. Just a little breeze can mean the difference between feeling really hot, and heat stroke.
And all jokes aside, if someone is showing signs of actual heat stress, ice water to the head can kill ya. Ice water on your wrists works really well. Stay safe peeps.
Sandridge @ 23, an honor, have always followed your comments.
25Sharon Greiff: Absolutely! I live outside Washington DC; – here’s a note from Forbes Magazine: Jul 5, 2001 – Washington, D.C., used to be considered a hardship post by foreign diplomats, who found the city’s malarial swamps and roasting summers as …”
26Someone send Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe a fried egg on a piece of pavement so he can crack a joke about “What global warming?” on the Senate floor…
Do what the Pawnees did: pitch your teepee over a 3′ deep hole and enjoy the cool in the well.
27Here along the Blue Ridge, it was unusual to get a week of 80+ degree weather for a week in August….this year it started in June. thank God (and I do mean that sincerely) it cools to the mid-60’s at night so we’re fine with ceiling fans, but I do not know how our children and (potential) grandchildren will fare.
28This is from the OMIGOD department.
Parked my car in the Safeway supermarket lot just the other day. When I came out and started the car I knew it was hellishly hot, but when the gizmo on the dashboard blinked 109 degrees fahrenheit I was still conscious so I gasped!!! Turning on the air conditioner when driving brought the numbers down into the 90 range. That was the first time I’ve ever seen that happen and damn I hope its the last! This heat is frying my hydrangeas!
Was in the local Sprint store after 5 yesterday to check on my bill. I have trouble believing the bills I am getting lately so this is only a wise thing to do. I drove through the oncoming push of a really bad storm which struck the minute I made it into the store. You guessed it! Power failure. All the electronic gadgets would not work – computers, cash registers and such. Was there long enough to think about being hungry. Kept my eye on a ginormous crane at a nearby construction site. According to the laws of physics, it would not blow over inasmuch as it wasn’t solid, but the long tether on whatever it had on the ground was swaying!
JJ, we have had more than our share of such nasty storms this year. All of them leave damage behind and yes I drove home hungry from the Sprint store and encountered debris in my way. And the first drop of rain was no sooner falling than we all heard the sirens of first responders all over the place. As I looked behind me on my way out of the Sprint parking lot, I saw a clot of all different first responders at the intersection 200 feet away. One minute into the storm and the first bash-up had occurred.
Sunny right now but dammit I don’t trust it!
29JJ, I don’t know about “hot food” … is that “spice hot” or “temperature hot”. What I remember from growing up in North Dakota (yes, it gets blazing hot there) … there was the saying “the hotter the day, the hotter the drink”. Lots of coffee drinkers among the Norwegians.
30After a very long, atypically snowy and rainy spring, I was hoping that summer here in Denver would be a bit more temperate this year. Nope. We’re in the middle of another string of days in the 90’s, and it’s supposed to hit 100 today.
The only saving grace is the low humidity, which means the temperature drops about 25-30 degrees at night. So I open the windows late at night for a few hours. Already had to close them this morning by 8:30, as the temp was already back up to 76.
31Back in the bad ole days when I had to work for my living, our organization moved from an older building with big, old oak trees entirely shading the parking lots to a brand spanking new building a mile or so south of no-damn-where with one giant parking lot shaded by half a dozen fruitless pear trees and the same number of telephone poles.
It came to pass that we contracted with a management consulting company from Vancouver to perform a project our IT organization had no enthusiasm for tackling. After signing the contract we urged the firm to schedule us in May, for any number of valid reasons including scheduled vacations, holidays, and the G*dless heat we all knew would come later in June, July, August, September, October, and the first half of November. And so in their infinite Canuck wisdom the vendor assured us they would arrive no later than July 15th and that the engagement would take no longer than 10 working days.
By the time July 15th arrived the overnight low was routinely 85 and the blue-haired ladies arrived at work around 6:30am to park in the “shade” of one of the telephone poles. 🙂
The Canucks flew into DFW and drove their rent car to our offices. With ALL the other cars parked on the periphery of the parking lot, those boys parked their rent car right in the middle, surrounded by 3+ acres of concrete.
At 4p they packed up and headed to their hotel to check-in, work etc. Whatever consultants do when they leave the client location. As they got into their rent car 60 pairs of IT eyes were on them, pressed against every available window in our qube farm.
When the driver touched the steering wheel I swear I heard him scream from 100 yards away. The walk across the parking lot reduced their appearances to that of death march survivors.
The next morn, the conversation involved comparisons of north Texas to the seventh ring of He77, etc etc.
32Davester @25, Thanks, we’ve pretty well gone to ‘two seasons’ here too: Over 90 degrees or under 90′.
33Waiting for it to become ‘over/under 100 degrees’ soon.
Our usual summer weather, here in Pittsburgh, usually entailed about 2weeks of hazy hot and humid. Recently, however, we’ve been stuck in that mode for the duration of the summer.
34The emphasis is on HOT. Our predicted heat index is over 100.
Early mornings are beautiful and precious, but beware the afternoons. Lots of homemade ice tea, ceiling fans, drawing the shades and not using the oven have become de rigueur.
Stock upon fudgecicles, and foods which can be cooked stove top or in the toaster oven. My 16 year old beagle prefers the mornings and the shade. He’s loving the AC as am I.