Weather

Being still a relative newbie to Phoenix, and in fact to the whole Southwest, I have to admit that I’m still pretty affected by the weather in these parts. 117 degrees Fahrenheit isn’t all that uncommon in the height of summer, but this morning at my house it dawned at exactly freezing – 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Zero degrees Celsius. Sure, it didn’t get cold enough for long enough for the air to remove enough energy from things to cause actual freezing, but there was enough moisture in the air for frost to form on the grass and on some plants and trees.

When the switch gets flipped here, it really gets flipped. Three weeks ago, it was routinely 80 during the day and overnight lows never really got much below 60-65 or so.

Of course, my friends up north in Oregon and Washington have been dealing with their own issues this week … Day after day of sub-freezing weather, freezing rain, icy roads and so on. I’m not a big fan of Phoenix or Arizona as a whole, but I do have to admit that right now, at this moment, it’s nice to not have to deal with all that. I’ve donned a fleece, and this morning i put the heat on in my bedroom (the rest of the house remains as is … I’ll resist turning on the furnace as long as possible – last year, I made it in to January before the main part of the house got chilly enough to need heat) but I was able to go out for coffee this morning without having to pull on a parka and scrape ice off my windshield.

This cold wave is affecting most of the west this week with ice and snow in places where you wouldn’t normally expect to see it this early in the season. LaNina, they say – so I guess a full-on winter is at hand. I’ll take it for now, thank you. It’s far, far better than what we have to deal with in the summertime!

We got off light this year in May – it was one of the coolest Mays on record here in the Copper State – but triple digit temps go with Arizona like peanut butter goes with jelly (which will both be running out the sides of the bread).

So, it begins.  If it’s like last year, we won’t see reasonable temperatures again until, oh, Thanksgiving.

But it is, as they love to say, “a dry heat”.  And certainly it is.  In fact, last summer, I found myself laughing at myself one evening when I was sitting out by the pool after having been in for a swim and I starting feeling chilly even as the thermometer on the wall still read 115 degrees a little before 10:00 at night.  That dry air is great for evaporative cooling, for sure