| Sunday, July 23, 2006 |
21:18 - It's hot
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9:00 in the evening, and it's 95° outside. And yet I've got my window flung wide open, because even with the air conditioner chugging away downstairs, it's still cooler outside than in my upstairs room. At least it's not humid.
I picked up a chip in my (brand-new car's) windshield on I-80 returning from Tahoe yesterday, and when we parked it for lunch the heat inside the car built up to the point where its pressure against the glass from the inside made the crack suddenly lengthen to about a foot. Bigger than a dollar bill? Yes... yes it is.
Yet coming up I-280 yesterday evening, I observed the car's thermometer register 113 at the 92 intersection, and then drop to 81 in the five miles from there to about halfway across the little ligature of I-380 that connects it to the airport. And then it rose to 89 between there and the El Torito three miles south on 101. Microclimates! Wheee!
Pulling into the Safeway parking lot this evening, I saw two or three of the aproned employees dashing across the lot, weaving between cars, zooming at full tilt from right to left across my field of vision. Their expressions were of a wide-eyed, open-mouthed excited involvement that I'm most familiar with in athletes mid-game, so at first I thought they must be horsing around in some kind of team-building exercise; but after a moment I realized that if people are running around on blacktop in this kind of heat, it's not for fun. Turns out someone had just brazenly stolen a cold six-pack out of someone's shopping cart who was coming out the front doors, and took off, evading his pursuers among the lines of parked cars, disappearing across the street.
This is some heat wave. And here I thought global warming was supposed to result in tiny fractional increases in temperature over the course of an entire statistical year...
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Brian Tiemann
