Heat Wave Update
My previous optimism about the ending of the heat wave having been cruelly dashed, it’s 7:00 pm in Little Beirut, and it’s 104. At this point, I don’t even care anymore. What, really, is the difference between 100 and 100-something?
Not much, let me tell you. I was working in a basement again. thank God, but the trips from here to there were decidedly less than pleasant., with no relief at the end. Humidity down to a Phoenix-like 20%, if anyone’s looking for silver linings.
More Weather news later on this CHNN station, and on CHNN News overnight.
Ok, I hate to be a brat, but it’s only 70 degrees here in Cleveland. It’s going to be a high of 81 in two days, but all in the 70s next week. I have nothing to do M-F, so come on over.
The Cleveland Visitors’ Bureau steps in, and just in time. I would if I could….
Sorry you’re scorched, CH. Here, down the Willy Valley, it was 106 today, (41 on my European car’s Centigrade display). Massive tall thunderheads bloomed above the Cascades in late afternoon, along the full visible North-South extent.
I luuuuvvvvvvvvv the heat. Born to it. (Eastern Oregon. August.)
Reminds me of one of my most-convulsed uproarious laughing fits, (if I can tell this right):
Johnny Carson was doing his “it’s so hot in L.A. today that …” shtick-standard, one time, and fairly well on a roll with 3 or 4 good ones, and the laughter sustaining after the last. And for timing, sort of a toss-off aside, and in the patter rhythm, he looks sideways, leans slightly back and says, “Doc, (Sevrensen, born in E. Oregon), have you ever seen it so hot?”
And the camera takes Doc, and his eyes looking at Johnny sort of float up toward the curtain pulls seeing a time long ago, and he says, s l o w l y, “yeah, yeah Johnny I have, hauling hay out around Prineville, and it would get so hot your sweat soaked your clothes [and the camera takes Johnny giving it that 'what?, wha'd I say?' perfect deadpan look of his, and back to Doc] dripping wet until you’d have to change before noon and the chaff and the dust swirled around the machinery and coated everything sticky dirty [take Johnny again, still mugging but with desperation in the expression, a pleading glance off-camera to Freddy DeCordova, and back to Doc] you could not drink enough water, gallons of it and it evaporated going down your throat and your throat so dryyy and the dust clogging your nostrils, sweat burning in your eyes [take Johnny staring glaring at Doc, still transfixed] so hot your mind started wavering like the …”
“Okay, Doc. All right. It musta been hot. We’ll be right back …,” says Johnny. No outro music and go to black.
I was laughing so hard at Doc’s sunstroke I fell off the haystack — been there, done that. Been to Texas: Hot. Been to Arizona: Hot. Uh, caliente. Been around some places, paving blacktop, nailing shingles: Hot. But there is nothing, repeat nothing, nowhere nohow an experience as stacking 100-lb bales coming up the loader on the top on the back of a moving field-truck, 5 cents a bale, 300 a load, 10 loads a day, 65 degrees at sunrise 105 (or more) at noon, no chaps no gloves no glasses no hat just hooks, and hay, and gallons of thermos’d water in the truck getting warm, out on that barren brown high plateau Oregon desert. Nothing.
Watching Doc lose it and forget all his staging, was like listening to a soldier relapse in shell shock — the same patrol, the same exploding mind-fusing trauma. . . over and … over and … over and ….
I luuuvvvvv the heat. It feels aliiive.
I did spend a few miserable summers in Burns, Oregon, where my father moved after my parents’ divorce. Fortunately, I was still too young at the time to do any hay-baling. The worst heat I’ve experienced was in New York City in the summer of ’88…. When I stepped out of the airport, I thought I must be standing under an exhaust duct, so damp, stifling, and smelly was the air.
Other sweltering places I’ve been, I missed the peak heat season, by design.
Mine was on a train to LA and the stop we made in Las Vegas. It was 10PM and I thought I had walked into an oven. I never thought any land could be that hot after the sun was down. I jumped right back on that air conditioned train.
I like the heat, too, but most folks I know really, really hate it.
My favorite heat story was of landing in Melbourne, Australia in a heat wave. It was over 100F, but no humidity (southerly winds coming out of the outback interior), at 9pm when we landed. Our hosts (Richard’s brother and his girlfriend) didn’t have A/C so we headed over to the bay and sat in waist-deep water until well past 3am, telling old Czech jokes (which don’t translate well), waiting for it to cool down enough to go back to the house and sleep. There were hundreds of people all around us doing the same. It was strangely surreal. A day at the beach, except it was night.
Sounds like fun, in an odd way, except the jokes. (but sometimes the best humor is the unintentional kind….)
Hang in there. It got up to 91 in Orlando today.
I have a link you might like.
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2213/Climate-Revolt-Worlds-Largest-Science-Group-Startled-By-Outpouring-of-Scientists-Rejecting-ManMade-Climate-Fears-Clamor-for-Editor-to-Be-Removed
Seems the professional Chemists are like the Physicists and are not on-board yet. The letters are better than anything I ever saw at UT.