Warm weather

We had a nice warm weekend – temp on both Saturday and Sunday made it up to 107f or so. Right now (1:50pm) it’s 105f, but the weather site says it only feels like 98f - there's that 'feels like' thing again. With humidity at 5% it isn’t totally horrible, but you still feel warm walking outside.

I just went over to our other building – the bank has two large buildings separated by a side street. There is no real bank lobby, we just do credit card processing here, no on site customer contact, so no fancy lobby or customer area. But walking outside did feel a lot different than walking around inside.

For some reason most businesses in warm climates seem to keep their inside temperature set really low, or at least it feels really low. I first experienced this my first July in Phoenix. Phoenix is usually ten degrees warmer than Vegas, but I was coming from upstate New York. It was 115f outside, yet the large stores kept their inside temp at 68f. Now I was used to Rochester, in the winter walking out from 65f to twenty below. But in preparation you usually put on layers of coats and gloves and hats. I Phoenix it was coming from an air conditioned car, to the outside, usually dressed in short sleeve shirts, back into cold stores. That’s a forty or fifty degree difference, with no way to take more clothes off outside, or putting on more going inside.

That’s the way it is here – leaving one building, with thermostats set at 68f, walking outside into the sunshine and an extra forty degrees, back into the cool interior of the other building. When you’re shopping it’s even worse, because you are then going to your car, which probably is a lot warmer inside than the air temp, waiting for the air conditioner in the car to start doing something – believe me, a car air conditioners do not work very well when the outside temp is over 110f. But by the time you get to the next store you have cold air blowing in from the vents, out to the hot air, and back into the cold. I think I get more colds during the summer because of all of this stress.

But our pool water temp is up to 90f, where it should stay until early November. So we are into our warm swim season. We usually go in around sunset – pools might look nice, and seem like a good idea when the air temp is 107f, but what I didn’t realize is the sunshine – even if the pool is cool, you are guaranteed to turn red in about three minutes if you lay out in the summer sunshine out here, or wash off the suntan lotion in the pool. So we do evening swims, and enjoy watching the sunset, and the stars come out overhead. I really like the summertime. Though it was much more fun as a kid when school let out and summer vacation really meant something.