Far worse here are the rattlesnakes. They came out of hibernation sooner than usual this spring because temperatures warmed up earlier.
Someone that lives in Florida, home of the whackdoodles, shouldn’t be so quick to cast aspersions.
Arizona is not as monolithic as you pretend. But sure, insult me and the rest of the SD posters that live here. Thanks for calling us pigs, angry and ignorant, and Arpaio lovers (you will note he got voted out.)
But hey, anything to keep people from moving here, I guess, even if it is wrong.
Good point. That was a kinda harsh.
In repentance I was going to post a link to “Florida man”, a fun website showing news snippets of the idiocy my statemates get up to. I hadn’t checked on it in a while, but I see it’s disappeared since I last looked. You might like these though:
For context - we relocated from the South Bay to the Sacramento area in 2000. The August day we moved into our new place it was 104 outside - typical summer day here. But it cools off at night (AKA Delta Breeze).
Our place in the Bay Area did not have AC, and we even owned cars there without AC during our years there. That is possible in the Bay Area, but not so in Sacramento, and in this area the heat is tolerable compared to Phoenix, IMHO. There were a handful of days we wished we had AC in the house in the Bay Area, but normally just opening the windows at night provided enough refreshing cooling.
I used to travel to Tucson occasionally for business (IMHO, a very nice city). One morning I had planned to go for a run before the sun came up, and my colleagues implored me not to go outside for that - it was going to still be 90 degrees. Before sun-up. Lots of treadmill and spin class time, I suppose.
I am sure if you go there you will eventually get acclimated, as most people do. I prefer not to have to spend 6 months per year indoors, tho.
I have never lived in Arizona, but i have ridden through it.
I learned a very important thing.
The movie the mummy is actually a true story, and Imhotep is someplace in Arizona, and he HATES Motorcycles.
That big wall of sand in the movie? Yea he made a bigger one and attacked me with it, in the middle of the road.
Convinced me not to make a return visit.
I lived in Tempe for a year about…15 years ago? I remember hating it intensely. It was too damn hot and barren and when it DID rain it was mass chaos with everything flooding and people being idiots. My car windshield cracked from the heat and I remember hearing it was ‘winter’ cause the temperature dropped below 100. Though one thing I did find hilarious was there was a ‘cold snap’ and it was like 65 out, people were in parkas.
I know Phoenix gets flooding. There are storm drain trenches running parallel to many streets and many parks and greenbelts are recessed to act as drainage basins. So, not many days of rain, but significant rain often enough to matter.
Also check out the wind storms. There’s usually advance warning, but they can bring visibility down to zero. The houses in the development that my son’s living in are all sandy colored, even the roof tiles, so that they don’t look so stricken after a wind storm.
All is forgiven!
And we zonies can be that bigoted*. We use the word Haboob** regularly, and it’s a mooslem word!
*I guess we are. From the link:
Despite some of the 1.5 million residents of Phoenix objecting to the term haboob being used, meteorologists in the city confirmed that they have been using the Arabic word to describe the massive dust storms for over 30 years.
**haboob’s only occur in Africa, the Middle East, Australia and Phoenix, Arizona. We’re special!
“We get only six-inches a year, but you should be here the day we get it.”
When I brought DesertWife to Phoenix for the first time on a Christmas visit, we were traveling down a stretch of I-17 that is in a below-grade trench for miles. “What are those blockhouses for?” she asked, pointing to a structure nestled in every underpass.
“That’s where the pumps live.”
“Pumps?”
“There not often needed, but when they don’t work, this turns into a canal.”
The winter rainy season lasts from about Thanksgiving to about Easter. We get two-thirds of our annual rainfall then and when it rains, everyone gets wet. A moderately heavy storm would drop about 3/4-inch in 24-hours.
The monsoon season (see my response to John Mace below) runs from late June to early September. The coverage is intermittent but if a thunderstorm cell passes over you, it can drop an inch in a half-hour. This can cause problems.
In the present iteration I’ve lived here nineteen years and never seen a scorpion, even poking around old lumber piles.
My brother, OTOH, keeps an annual score on his chores white board. Typically it’s five or six. I think I’m lucky.
[igor]Well, they were wrong then, weren’t they?[/igor]
If the decision was based on something like, “Well, above 120-degrees the bearing lubricant gets too thin to be effective,” I’d call that technical. When the decision is based on, “Well, nobody but idiots would demand commercial air service where it can go over 120-degrees,” I call that bureaucratic. If those experts lived here and ignored deicing requirements, you’d call them short-sighted, wouldn’t you?
A joke here is: We got two seasons, Summer and August. In truth though, the hottest month is June*. From early April to late June the daily high creeps upward and the humidity drops into single-digits. We’re about halfway through that process now and today’s predicted high is over 100-degrees for the first time this year (we’ve been flirting with it for a while with several days topping at 98 or 99). Late June, the temp is high enough to trigger the monsoon season where we start to draw (relatively) moist air from the Gulf of Mexico instead of the West Coast. The daily high drops by five or ten degrees but the humidity shoots up to 40% or so.
I can hear the folks in Atlanta laughing now, but they aren’t often contending with triple-digit temps. The bad part is that the air is moist enough to trap the heat so it doesn’t cool down at night. I used to leave for work at 4:30am and low- to mid-nineties was the norm with it occasionally (like once every few years) it still being over a hundred.
*Note the date of the all-time record high John and I have been talking about.
I spent a total of 3 days in Phoenix for a meeting one September some years ago. I thought the weather was incredibly oppressive. Dry heat, my ass. It’s sweltering. I did drive to the Grand Canyon and on the way thought that Flagstaff was quite pleasant, weather wise. If you don’t mind hot weather, I suppose Phoenix would be okay. I’ll stay in my northern paradise and leave the hot weather to those that like it.
It’s a dry heat. Except when it’s not. Late summer is the monsoon season, and the humidity does set in. It seems like the temps are a wee bit cooler, but it feels hotter.
We actually get the tail of that in CA a few days.
Obviously, there are a lot of people who love it, since they live there. But one colleague of mine had to move out there because of her husband’s job, and she’s been there about two years, and almost every other frickin’ day it’s her complaining about the weather or the drivers there. I had to unfollow her, as it just became a broken record.
That said, the dry heat stuff is kind of true. I was there for a week when it was in the 110s, and it felt more comfortable to me than Chicago in the 90s. Usually, I visit during Thanksgiving where it’s more like 60s to 70s, but the constant cloudless, blue skies every single day just drives me insane. I know to many people that is paradise. My father-in-law seems to enjoy it there; my mother-in-law (they’ve lived there 12+ years) is, shall we say, a bit less enamored with it.
As bad drivers go, eh, we’re no Boston or Illinois. But it’s legal to use the phone and drive here, and it shows. You’re at a stop light, it turns green and neither car in front of you moves because each driver is on their phone and each is watching to see the other car move with their peripheral vision. I don’t count how many times we’ve almost been hit, and almost in every case the driver is texting.
Oddly enough, the person bitching about the weather and driving is from Chicago. (I actually do not quite understand her driving complaint. I haven’t found driving to be particularly bad there, just less aggressive, so if you’re a Type A, it can grate a bit at the lazy pace. But, traffic-wise, it’s nothing like how bad it gets here in Chicago.)
The “dry heat” works only so much. If you’re walking around at 100+ degrees the sun is going to beat down on you.* If you’re settin’ in the shade with an iced tea by your elbow you’re reasonably comfortable but the iced tea is essential. You’re comfortable because you’re sweating and the sweat immediately evaporates, keeping you cool. If you’re not hydrating, your internal water runs low and and you fall over twitching. Since their brows and armpits aren’t sopping, newcomers don’t realize this and fall prey. We were carrying around those half-liter bottle holsters some 25 years ago.
Blue skies: I suppose it depends on what you’re used to. When my parents moved to Pennsylvania (Reading) my brother came back here to attend ASU. Thanksgiving he and his roommate from Clovis NM visited them. The third straight day of overcast, the kid asked my mom if it was like that all the time. “Pretty much.” “How do they stand it?”
*When people ask what it’s like during the summer, I tell them that stepping outside feels kind of like opening an oven door to check on a batch of cookies and the heat rolls out and hits you in the face, only it doesn’t stop.