h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

6.45 am. Got up. Had a shower. Made a cup of tea.

8.00 am. Walked to the supermarket.

9.00 am. Got home. Had another shower. Put the food away.

It's hot out there. Not going out again until the Durham Test is over (please don't get bowled out cheaply Australia, make it last five days). Bought bread. I don't normally do that but putting the oven to bake a loaf at this time of the year is insanity with knobs on. You'd have to be radio rental to do that.

Yep. If I don't get out before 7:30 for my 1 - 1.3 mile walk in the mornings, I don't go. Instead I do a couple of laps around the inside of the building (up and down stairs 4 times) a couple of times a day. Bicycle riding to work is now out of the question until Autumn. Bicycling after work has to wait until after dark.

If I'm ever able to retire, and I can stand being away from metropolitan areas, I'll enjoy the property I'll inherit in West (bygod) Virginia. Nice cool mountain breezes in the Summers. High enough to not worry about sea levels rising.

I really can't imagine how you put up with it. I get totally useless when it goes up to about 27°C - anything over that and I'm in a state of uselessness until it cools down again.

That's why I stay indoors as much as possible between the beginning of July and the middle of September, and rack up huge electricity bills. I got an email yesterday from a friend asking if I (and a handful of other friends) wanted to go to a weekly outdoor gig in a local park. The replies were mostly along the same lines: "Are you out of your tiny mind? It's the hottest day of the year so far/forecast to be 105 (it actually made 106)/I'm not going unless there's a kiddies paddling pool to sit in".

Vitamin D deficiency be hanged, the sun is the enemy at this time of the year. I'll take a supplement. Speaking of which...

It's hotter than 27°C at our coolest right now! * *sweaty, scorchio smiley


I saw 2legs complaining that 25°C was too hot to do ANYTHING on twitter a week or so ago and I just had to .

to be fair we almost never get sustained temperatures like this so of course when they come, anyone like 2legs and me who really don't like it have a really hard time.

it takes a lot for it to be so warm here that night-time temperatures are too warm to sleep but that's when you realise what a good thing aircon can be. But it's not worth it for the odd month a decade when it would be useful.

On the other hand I do have friends who live in hot climes who are hilarious when they have to live in 10°C for a day or two.

Plus, don't foreget, here in the UK, last winter ran from two years ago, until May this year... seriously... (last summer was two years ago, so taht must be the case)

We've cooled here a bit now, so at least its livible, in the early 20's and just making it to the mid 20's on hotter days, we were at 230 for a few weeks, and I just couldn't cope at all
I've also not made bread in ages, as its been too warm, though I'm tempted to have a bash tomorrow, as its not as* hot now not quite sure if I can muster the energy though

I've been making a lot of ice-lollies but the recipies require stock syrup which you have to boil. But the taste is so totally worth it.

yesterday it was around 19°C and it was so cold at night (compared to recently) I had to put my quilt on in the middle of the night. Today it was about 22°C and our 50k cycle ride was great (compared to last week's in 28°C. Those few degrees and a bit of sunshine make all the difference to me.

Stock syrup doesn't take too long boiling, not like the rock and pear drops and toffee and honeycomb I used to make. I'd get through three or four shirts a day, and curiously, I didn't sweat too much while I was standing over the fires stirring the sugar or working at the slab putting the stripes in the sweets, it was when I started turning the handle on the humbug machine. Once we started putting a batch of humbugs through the girls I worked with would start a countdown for when the dark patch started to appear on my back

Yep, it was just like one of these http://www.loftypursuits.com/sites/default/files/humbug%20machine_0.JPG?1310694491

It really is just one or two degrees that can make the differnce... 21, or 22 fine, its warm, but you/I can still do 'stuff', 23 to 25 starts getting really too hot for me, and above that I sort of cease to funcion anything above about 17 at night I find a bit to warm

I don't advise a visit to Texas around this time of the year for you or Sho. Our minimum temperature sometimes doesn't drop below 80F/26.7, although if you're in a hotel, or a place bigger than mine, the a/c will be running through the night.

I can still remember the first time I experienced heat after the sun had gone down. It was one of the first trips I took to New York. We went to see a film in Manhattan which let out around 9.30pm. As we walked out of the cinema I felt a blast of heat. Well, to a Londoner like me he was used to it getting a bit chilly once the sun went down, it felt like a blast. Put it this way, it was as hot when we came out in the dark as it had been when we went in with the sunshine warming our backs. It was probably somewhere in the low to mid 80sF, upper 20sC.

Of course, even NYC heat is chilly compared to south central Texas heat The current temperature is... well, an hour ago it was 104F/40C, and they update it at 51 minutes past the hour but take about ten minutes to post it, and 4.00 - 5.00pm is usually our hottest time of the day so it might make the 106 they forecast. It won't go below 90 until after 10pm.

Why the hell did anyone - especially Germans - settle this land?

Well, it was a bit cooler a century and a half ago.

The hockey stick isn't *that* big It would have been almost as scorchio then as it is now. That's why Texas has the flora and fauna it does

I've just been chatting with a friend who is in Bulgaria (hot, but not in the Texas league - around 34°C) and we both hate the heat with a passion. But what I had forgotten (because it is a long time since we had a heatwave) is how exhausting it is managing the heat.

This is why you all should visit me in the summer (though September to midOctober is nicer)--it rarely reaches 20C.

I dunno... This last decade or so has been particularly scorchio. I'm not saying the folks fresh off the dock in Indianola, TX were greeted by cool breezes, mind you. I'm just sayin' that central Texas wasn't the kiln it is now. Keep in mind, they tended to settle in river valleys (New Braunfels and such). Not only has the temps climbed in the meantime, it was also much less arid in the Hill Country. (I'd be perfectly content to see every golf course in the Big Bend either shut down or be required to adapt their fairways to local conditions. I see no problem with fairways made of sand and clay with some care taken for consistency.) The summers are noticeably hotter today than they were when I was a kid, with a few memorable exceptions, (I believe '80 was fairly brutal.) Bring it back another century, according to that hockey stick, and I would not be surprised if temps above the century mark in Summer were rather more exceptional than expected as they are today.




(Mental note, I should write an entry on Indianola. It was the second largest port in Texas and the port of entry of most of the German and Czech immigrants before it was leveled by a massive hurricane a few years prior to the Great Storm of 1900 that nearly destroyed Galveston. Part of the rationale for building up Galveston was the false notion that such large storms would hit farther South in the manner of the Indianola storm. To do the entry properly, I should take a ride down to take a photo what's left of Indianola today: A bare patch near the coast with an historical marker as the only evidence of the former city.)

What are your winters like, Amy? Don't get me wrong, I love summer - no need to wear so many clothes and the sunshine makes people happy.

But 2legs (I think it was him?) got it just about right, we've just been through about 18 months of near-enough winter weather which hasn't been a lot of fun.

I don't agree with that actually. I reckon we had 6 months of Spring, and then almost two weeks of Summer, which happily coincided with the Olympic fortnight. Once that was over we started Autumn.


Geggs

Well, these last 2 winters have been weird--long stretches of "summer" but then this past March there was actual frost! That was thick enough to have to scrape from the windshield at 8am! And isolated frosty spots in the shade when I'd leave for work at 10ish am!--but normally they are wet and windy (if you've read Gnomon's Entry on Coastal Redwoods that he gave me credit on, I'm the source of the "horizontal rain" quote) and usually the temperatures range from (checks conversion) 4ish to 12ish, with a very rare dip down to 0 (all temps are C--F would be 40ish to 55ish, with dips to 32). Feels colder because of the humidity and the wind.

Yeah, there's a reason I don't whine about being cold in the winter on here