For a bit of relief - if you don’t mind how it looks to others, aluminum foil on the windows will greatly reduce solar heating.
“Poor man’s air conditioning”
I’m nocturnal, so it has a double bonus.
But yeah, heat sucks. Count yourself (relatively) lucky that it is dry - I lived (?) in FL for a year or so - hot AND muggy. The wildlife was was also intolerable, but compared to the weather, it was nothing.
Inland CA is also baking - on top of a historic drought.
Fun in the sun!
NJ also has terrific Korean, Indian (Northern and Southern), Chinese, Greek, Hungarian, and probably a zillion other cuisines that I can’t think of right now. NJ is a pretty diverse place with a wide variety of great chow.
I am baffled as to why anyone would have to mow their lawn in summer. We just let it go yellow, no need to mow it until, like, October.
How’s this for giggles:
Sacramento actually has/had a law that residential front lawns “must be planted and irrigated”. They actually will slap a $750 fine on anyone who lets the grass die.
Which is why even tiny cheap houses have automatic sprinklers in the front yard.
I just wasted a hundred gallons or so letting the sprinklers run for 10 minutes because they grass was going from yellow to brown.
It attracts vermin, that’s why. And it looks like shit. Of course, there’s no danger of our lawns going yellow here, not with all the rain we’ve had.
We actually had to go to water rationing starting last month, and the city sent around a notice that, among other things, said we would not get fined for letting our lawns die.
I envied you when I read “dry,” but 100 degrees is hot.
Here it’s mid-May until October when we’ll finally get a few cool days interrupting the hot ones. I’ve seen near 90 degree heat last until the second half of November.
I cut the yard this weekend. After I showered, got online for a bit, I went outside on the shaded front porch to let one of my cats out (indoor cat but — after much begging — is allowed on the porch and to go halfway down the front walk while under my supervision). We were out there for about half an hour. I came into the house and thought how cool the house was compared to the outside. The house was 84, I hadn’t turned on the A/C yet. The outside had a heat index of 104. It was 11 in the morning.
And that was the coolest day of the weekend.
I went grocery shopping last night, got back about 10:30 – heat index was still 104. Wake up at 5:30 in the morning. Temperature is 85, heat index is 96.
Three and a half months of heat indexes routinely being over 100, close to 105 and up to 110 and nights that never cool off.
I could deal with the daytime heat if we could get some relief at night. But there’s no relief from the combination of heat and humidity.
Because my neighbors would call code enforcement on me. And I’d get a warning to cut it and if I didn’t, I’d get a court appearance and a fine.
Just because your lawn stops growing in the summer doesn’t mean it stops growing everywhere. Here we cut until November (and sometimes we cut in November) and start cutting again the beginning of March. Only months of the year we’ll never need to cut are December and January. By February it’s some weird combination of winter and spring with the flowers in bloom and grass growing.
Your city has a code requiring a green lawn?? Good grief. I could understand an HOA (not that I like them) but a code?
We got rid of the lawn and went with drought-resistant landscaping. It looks nice and except for occasional trimming and weeding is very low-maintenance. I can’t believe how much less work (and water) it is than grass.
It’s not at all unusual. It has to do with property values, urban blight and all that yadda yadda. If we didn’t have such a large front yard (by S Cal standards) I’d consider pulling out the lawn as well.
Wow. Never heard of that.
Last week our state government passed a bill to outlaw such codes in local governments. Last year they passed a law to prevent HOAs from making such codes, too.
It’s raining! It’s rainingitsrainingitsraining!
Whee!
(Looks nervously in the direction of Texas…)
Yeah… if you can grow citrus where you live, your winters are pretty much inconsequential. Even ours, ~300 miles north of Houston (where Clothahump lives, involve the occasional hard freeze and cold snap where the temp’s below freezing for a few days.
And… for those of you who live in places where the summers are hot and arid like me, you can keep your lawn alive, if not exactly happy, with one watering a week for about an hour or two. Long enough to soak in deep, so that the roots will grow downward and get whatever’s down deep and not quite dried out by the sun.
My small town of a little over 900 people has an ordinance requiring you to mow your lawn if it gets over 8 inches or they will cut it and bill you. I’ve never had that happen but I can’t imagine the bill would be small or reasonable if the city is involved. They don’t require a green lawn though.
Looks like the “coldest” it gets is around the forties. Yeah, call me when it’s -10. LOL (You haven’t experienced “cold” until you’ve felt your boogers freeze)
Apparently, only during the drought. Whatever that is as defined by the government …
The Dallas area does get some really shitty weather including some really nasty cold even if you ignore the extreme heat, violent thunderstorms and tornadoes. The worst roads I have ever driven on bar none were in Dallas during a sleet/ice storm and I live in the Northeast. There is nothing you can do but hope and pray no matter what type of vehicle you have. They don’t have any real winter road equipment so everything just stays frozen over with carnage everywhere. It doesn’t have anything to do with driving skills. No one can drive on it well unless you own a Sherman tank with special snow tracks. I go there in April every year. You would think that it would be warm and sunny during that time but that is not the case. Half the time, it is drizzling and downright cold especially considering I never bring cold weather clothes due to an idiotic sense of optimism.
That said, I can’t sympathize with the OP. I am Deep Southern boy at heart and my really deep roots go back to prehistoric Africa. I am a member of a tropical species that believes that anything less than about 75F is starting to get a little life threateningly chilly. I am glad that brave explorers have experimented with settling the mostly uninhabitable parts of the globe like the Northeast, Midwest, Northwest and, for the really extreme masochists, Canada, but I feel a calling back to my native habitat - the steamy jungle regions. Sure, you get a little sweaty but that is what those glands are made for and it is good for you. I have learned from experience that is much better than suiting up like an astronaut on a space walk just to move your car during a Northeastern winter.
As far as I’m concerned, you haven’t lived until you’ve gone trick or treating in the snow!
Doesn’t sound too much different from Western PA, with the added bonus of floods.
Try driving in Pennsylvania – rain or shine. There’s a reason we were voted “Worst Roads in the US”.
To signal ships approaching the Los Angeles Harbor, of course.