Out Arizona Way
#91
"A few have taken to circling around the Walmart parking lot waiting for a handicap spot to open."

We do that here also! Big Grin
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
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#92
(01-11-2020, 05:40 AM)Tyson Rayles Wrote: "A few have taken to circling around the Walmart parking lot waiting for a handicap spot to open."

We do that here also! Big Grin

Yeah, but at 6:00 in the morning???? We do... Crazy
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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#93
At that hour I'm just getting up and the closest Wally World is in the next county so I won't be circling until around noon or so! Big Grin
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
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#94
Usually, by 6:00AM, I've been asleep for only an hour-or-so, but have more success cruising the Walmart lots late at night...especially the ones that aren't open 24 hours.

Wayne
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#95
(01-12-2020, 12:43 PM)doctorwayne Wrote: Usually, by 6:00AM, I've been asleep for only an hour-or-so, but have more success cruising the Walmart lots late at night...especially the ones that aren't open 24 hours.

Wayne

Yeah, I find that's the best way to get the prime parking space at any place that's not open yet. Tried it once at a drive-in theater but for some reason, it didn't work too well.  Nope
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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#96
If Wayne is cruising the Walmart parking lot after hours he probably isn't looking for a parking space! Big Grin
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
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#97
(01-13-2020, 07:28 AM)Tyson Rayles Wrote: If Wayne is cruising the Walmart parking lot after hours he probably isn't looking for a parking space! Big Grin

Could be, but knowing Wayne, I'm betting it's because he's running on an HO time clock... Awesome
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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#98
Been a while since I posted one of my articles. I frequently talk about the heat, and so I dug this one up since we are heading back to where all the TV newscasters are telling us how to deal with these things.

Heat I

Note that I wrote this back in August 2007. Temps right now are pushing the 110 mark, not quite up to 117 yet, but just wait a little bit. Everything else still holds true....

There’s no doubt that the hottest time of the year has hit. You’ve heard the expression, “but it’s a dry heat,” and by golly, they’re right. Let me tell you a bit about that. The other day the official temperature at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix was 117, but as we were driving home that afternoon, the outside temperature on our car thermometer read 122. Now the humidity was somewhere around 4% and, yes that’s dry all right, and I’m sure it only “felt like” 110, but you know what? That’s still hot, I don’t care how long you live here; you don’t want to be out in that kind of heat. To be sure, once it gets over 110, it’s hard to notice the difference; it’s just too hot to even think about it.

Unusual things happen around here when it gets this hot. Seems to me that some people think that the hotter it is, the less clothes they need to put on. I wish some of them would rethink that theory. I can think of thousands of things I’d rather be doing then standing in line at Walmart behind 300 pounds of bare jiggling cellulite in flip-flops and shorts. Another fact of life here is our building boom. There are always new sub-divisions and shopping centers being built. Come summer and you will find them pouring concrete by spotlight around 4 AM, with others hammering and slinging stucco before the first crack of light. I don’t envy them, but they do their best to be out of there by early afternoon, still well into the 100-degree mark.

Two things one learns very quickly after spending at least one summer here. The first is that one does not touch any metal parts on a car that has been sitting in a parking lot for any length of time. Thank God for keyless entry systems, but still, you can see people trying to slide into the car without touching anything, then rolling down the windows to let out the hot air. It can get well over 140 degrees inside a closed car within minutes. You can actually get a serious burn if you touch a piece of metal trim. You learn to drive without grabbing the steering wheel for the first mile or so, until the A/C cools things down, but the blazing sun still makes to difficult to touch anything, even inside the car. Also, wait a bit before you put on your sunglasses that have been sitting in your car, unless you want to look like a circus clown when you take them off. The second thing you only make a mistake once is picking up a garden hose that’s been sitting in the sun without first running the water for a few minutes. The water in the hose gets hot enough to actually scald and cause serious pain. Speaking of water, can you imagine the delight when you get home from a hard-days work, hot and tired and want to refresh yourself by jumping in the swimming pool? Except that the water is now around 95 degrees, and it feels like bathwater. Many pools have a system where the water is sprayed in the air and evaporation will actually cool it down as it falls back into the pool. Considering the fact that an average in-ground pool contains about 20,000 gallons of water, you are lucky if it cools the water down one or two degrees; but you take what you can get. So goes it with taking a cool shower. Turn the faucet to full cold, and the water still comes out hot.
We grow a type of grass here called Bermuda. Bermuda grass browns out and goes dormant in the winter, and so in the spring, you can start watering it again and when the nights start reaching 90 degrees, it will green up rather quickly. Other types of grasses are used, but this is the most popular because it is designed for our climate and it spreads easily by throwing off runners rather than individual blades, plus you should never have to replant it. Can you imagine nights where it’s still 100 degrees at midnight? It doesn’t make for much fun at a drive-in theater. We do have our cool evenings though, that can come during our “monsoon” season. Well, more on that next time, I can’t possibly talk about living in the Arizona heat in just one article. In the meantime, just think about our winters here, they make this all worth enduring.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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#99
Yeah - It's a dry heat.... Same as in our oven!! Smile Smile
~~ Mikey KB3VBR (Admin)
~~ NARA Member # 75    
~~ Baldwin Eddystone Unofficial Website

~~ I wonder what that would look like in 1:20.3???
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I dunno, Don, but that sounds pretty inviting to me.  A few days ago, they were complaining about the heat around here, saying that with the humidity (the Niagara Peninsula is pretty-much surrounded by water, so humidity is not uncommon) the temperature was the "equivalent" of 36ºCelsius, or 96ºFahrenheit. 
I was dressed appropriately, though, with jeans, two pairs of socks, some safety boots, a teeshirt, and a fairly heavy long-sleeved shirt.  The wife wanted me to drive her somewhere, and kept buggin' me to put on the air conditioning - heck, I had two windows partially opened.

When I was still working, standard garb in the summer was long underwear, jeans, a tee shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and coveralls, plus the two pairs of socks, and the usual safety equipment - hardhat, safety boots, ear-protectors, and safety glasses, and gloves...always gloves. 
In the winter, the wind would come in off the harbour, and I recall walking through a snowdrift on the operating floor, and opening a nearby soaking-pit cover to check the steel, which wasn't quite ready for rolling, as it was only 2250ºF.

I'll take hot over cold anytime.

Wayne
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I'm with Wayne, I hate the cold. To be honest at my age now I'm not crazy about extremes in either direction.
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
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I always enjoy your stories Don.Last week we had the air conditioner on as my wife doesn't like the heat/humidity so I end up wearing a sweater in the house---as the saying goes "happy wife,happy life"
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One thing I have to do today is to crank down the temp setting on the hot water heater. When it's this hot out, the cold water brings the temp up to the point where it's too hot to be able to take a shower in. I had the shower lever just barely on this morning and it was really hot. Normally, in the winter months, I have to set the lever at almost full in order to keep from freezing. I don't think they make shower controls with separate hot and cold knobs anymore. A pity, I'd only use the cold one in the summer if I had one.

Wayne, 2250° is just about how hot the outside of our vehicles get. Icon_rolleyes I'm surprised that they don't melt just sitting in a parking lot.

Yeah, I agree, I don't like the cold either, that's why we live where we are.... 2285_ I can poke fun at the heat, but this past winter, I don't think we ever had to worry about our outdoor plants freezing. Some winters we do though...

Ed, my wife is the opposite, so I keep the A/C just a degree or two above what I think is comfortable. Even then, our monthly electric bill in the summer is between $300-400 clear into October.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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I thought it would be fitting to post this today, 30 years after the record heat:


Heat II

The last time we were talking about our monsoon season. This is when late in the afternoon we are hit with a wall of dust followed by a short period of very intense rain. Temperatures can drop a good 20 degrees in minutes. All this can cause sever flooding and you can be guaranteed that your vehicles will be covered with spots of mud if you left them outside. The dust cloud can sometimes be 20 or more miles wide and up to a mile high. Now technically, they use to declare the monsoon as having started when the average dew point reaches 55 degrees or higher for three consecutive days. Now June 15 is the official start regardless of this dew point thing. They now declare September 30 as the end of the season, but I usually just wait for a few weeks of no rain before I assume the rainy season is over and I can go and wash the mud off our vehicles. It's weird, the day after a storm you can tell which vehicles were outside when it hit. The rain is spotty; some areas might get an inch or more in an hour, while others barely get a drop. I’ve actually seen it pour on one side of the street and be totally dry on the other side.

Now the natural desert has what are called washes, places where rain runoff can flow like a river. After several months of no rain and a blazing sun, the desert floor becomes hard. When we have a lot of rain in a short period, rather than soaking in all the water, the excess runs off and collects in these washes. Since all this was a desert at one time, when they develop property, they are required to maintain these washes. In some places, they run streets so that they channel the runoff. In other places, they maintain the integrity of the original wash and keep it separate. Frequently, they will use these as parks, running or riding trails, but be warned, get out of them at the first sign of a storm. All over, in housing areas, shopping centers and along roadways, you’ll find catch basins designed to hold rainwater to keep it out of the sewer systems. These are also landscaped and some serve as a local play area. A lot of these larger washes run across roads, some are bridged others are not. Again, one has to use caution when approaching these since a wall of water, sometimes 10 or more feet high, can be coursing its way down what looks like a dry wash. Worse, you think the water is only a few inches deep when you drive in it, but find that it is really five feet deep and your car is only four foot, nine inches tall. Frequently they’ll find the car a few hundred yards downstream, and it’s occupants a few days later a mile or two away. We have what we call the “stupid motorist” law. That being if anyone needs rescuing after circumventing flood barriers, they pay the full cost of their rescue, and usually their insurance won’t cover the damage because it is self-inflicted.

The hottest day on record was an official 122 degrees at the Phoenix airport. That happened on June 26, 1990. One could tell it was hotter than usual since your feet would kind of sink into the asphalt in the parking lot rather than just stick a little. Air traffic was halted because the airplane charts didn’t go high enough and they weren’t sure there was enough runway length for them to take off. Around here, you’ll find people circling in a mall parking lot for a half-hour just to find a parking spot near an entrance. One goes from an air-conditioned house to an A/C car then to an A/C store. You never leave that environment for more than a minute or two as you run from one to the other. These summer storms frequently cause power outages, mostly from lightning strikes. You can call the power company and they will give you an estimate as to when they will restore power in your area, then you do what any sane individual would do, you head out to a store that still has power and you suck up as much of their A/C as you can. If the estimate is more than a few hours, you usually wind up at a movie. Hey, just because we live in this heat doesn’t mean that we don’t know how to deal with it sensibly.
 
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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Tell us again as to what made you decide to live there? Big Grin
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
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