Out Arizona Way

[ezdays]

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.