I live in Fremont, and we used to have free air conditioning. Our house is well insulated, and when we moved here 25 years ago we’d open the windows at night and run fans, and that would keep the place cool even when it got hot outside, and it would be fine unless the heat wave lasted more than three days. But climate change has made it get hotter more often and longer, and we finally splurged on real air conditioning. Thank you oil companies.
San Francisco is always cooler. Especially near the water.
And when we took our daughter to her horse barn over the Sunol Grade the temperature went up 20 degrees or more.
My wife is a weather junkie, and she is disappointed because the Weather Channel almost never covers us.
Yeah, to most of those places, but Death Valley?? It’s a wonderland of different little worlds. But if your view of beauty can only contain leafy trees than it’s not for you.
Bad things happen in the California desert. It’s bat country, haunted by visions of the Manson Family chasing you down in dune buggies and the ghosts of Japanese-Americans languishing in internment camps. Many a teen like me who grew up in California in the mid-20th Century made a “lets go to the desert and get stoned and naked and blow shit up” rite of passage and swore to avoid it as much as possible in the future except when necessary to get to Mammoth Mountain or Vegas.
Which … brings us right back around to “and if you haven’t done that, then … well … I’m not so sure I even want to know you” territory.
Again, I’m painting with a broad brush, so try not to nitpick me to death over this. I’ve been all over the SW United States, spent a couple of months in the four corners area, so I’ve seen some spectacular dry landscapes, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Same with eastern Oregon/Washington. I spent a week at Badlands and enjoyed it, but I’m not going to move to that area. I’m an Alaska boy at heart and soul and the heat doesn’t agree with me at all. I grew up with mountains and forest in my back yard and it’s what I prefer. There’s a month or two in Portland when I would just as soon not go outside, but it beats any other places we looked when considering retirement.
When I was a child in the Santa Clara Valley watching all the orchards get ripped out for tract housing I used to fantasize being the only person alive in California. Just herds of elk and deer, vast flocks of birds over the thousands of square miles of wetlands, grass taller than your head.
I didn’t get my wish.
Then there are those of us who instead turned it into an annual tradition (going on 40 years come November.)(Except the naked part. Do you have any idea how cold the Mojave can get at Thanksgiving?)
I know, right? They never broadcast when it goes from “pleasant” to “nice”. Send your wife here: Weather West. It’s a California-centric weather blog with more hard information than Weather Channel ever has.
Car-killing fogs. Fogs.
Not frogs. That clears up my confusion.
As for California, when I was a kid we would visit my aunts in north county San Diego. A lot of great memories of those trips. Almost 50 years later, my wife bought a vacation condo about 10 miles from where my aunts used to live. I love going there, and quite glad she didn’t buy the condo she was considering in Chicago.
I absolutely loved visiting it (except for trying to drive and park in downtown San Francisco. We started out in San Francisco, drove all the way up the coast to Grant’s Pass Oregon and back down the central valley. I would hate to live their due to the extreme leftist politics and cost of living.
The car-killing frogs are in Calaveras County.
For those who think car-killing fogs just shows how bad California drivers must be, let me relay, anecdotally, what tule fog is.
It’s a low, surface hugging fog that is denser than any fog you can imagine. As a child, I remember once traveling back home from dinner in Stockton. We were on Highway 4, which was a two lane road, elevated about 15-20 feet above the farmland on both sides (not unusual in delta areas, where building a mound of firm earth to put the road on is necessary).
I woke up when I realized my mom had the passenger side door open. I sat up and could see the night sky, the stars, the clouds, etc. But there was a fog that came up just above the hood of the car. Above the hood, miles of visibility. Below the hood, all you could see is a glow from the headlights. No road, no oncoming headlights. My mom had her door open and was leaning out and letting my dad know where the stripe that indicated the shoulder was, and we were creeping along at a few miles an hour. Luckily it was a patch and we eventually got to a less dense section and could drive more normally. I would have hated to think how long it would have taken to get home if it had been more widespread.
Okay. That was bad 
Might I suggest that you ask for Clemens-y for that one ?
Ah - thank you. Ignorance fought!
I worked for FiOS TV when Verizon first launched it. In California our systems were in Ventura, and Lake Elsinore. Not really understanding about localization of TV, the Verizon folks installed one WeatherStar (the device that does local inserts “on the 8s” on The Weather Channel”) to serve everything.
Needless to say, it was rarely right for either place, and never right for both simultaneously. I fielded complaints daily and worked with TWC, which told me that to be accurate for our service area, we’d need 22 such devices.
Being a lifelong NYer to that point I couldn’t imagine this wide range. But a year later I moved on from VZ, to Orange County, and quickly understood about the microclimates.
Not much to add to what’s already been listed about the bad and good. I’m glad I took the job and moved us here.
Well, heck, we have all that in MN. We even have more coastline, but we don’t have the ocean, and our farmers’ markets are particularly meager during hockey season.
Generally on my hands and knees, in the dark. If it weren’t for California, Tahoe would drain off to the west.
I hear you, but this happening everywhere. When I went to the U of I in the mid-70s there was nothing but farms between the Ford dealership and Willard Airport in Champaign. When I went back 20 years later it was all built up