Too hot or not?

Am I seeing things or did you edit your post
I think people get acclimated to their enviroment.

TTH: I constantly edit 'til the last possible second, so you're eyes aren't playing tricks. Sorry for the contusion.

oh...yes, I can see acclimatizing to reasonable temp swings. But who or how do you acclimatize yourself to extended exposure of 115 deg F.....or going in and out of an 72 deg F a/c room and then 115 F and then back again?

I was laughing because the #'s were changing
No apology needed....

and you did it again

I'm sorry I apologized. I take a lot of heat for that!

Fun, huh?

Ragman, I edit my posts frequently for errors in typing, etc. Why does it matter?
I also edit if I have missed a comment by someone who I like to acknowledge.

Somehow, I seem to be able to stand the heat better than the cold. I guess it's my body type.

Winter months in MN and WI were brutal when I lived there. (Grew up in MN, lived in WI for nearly a decade.) I didn't like living in temperate L.A., though. It was boring. None of the thrill of spring. None of the thrill of the first cool breezes of autumn or the first snow. So annoying when people would freak out over a thunderstorm.

Columbus is somewhere in between, and as long as we get a few good snowstorms a winter I like it, but I prefer snow on the ground + temps around zero to gray muddy dreary days and temps around 30's and 40's.

One can acclimate to quite a bit.

Today, after a week or 2 or really high heat, I both noted to myself and mentioned to another in passing that it had really cooled off, and felt really pleasant out. The person I was passing the time of day with whole heartedly agreed, saying "There's even a 50% chance of rain tonight"

Getting in the car, I heard the local weather forecast, and glanced at my car thermometer for confirmation.....

It was 99 degrees.

Ever since early childhood, I've always hated the summer, even growing up on the relatively cool Jersey Shore.

Here in Austin during the summer, I get things done outside early in the morning.

Sure July, August and Sept are hot. But the rest of the year is beautiful.

I lived in Wisconsin twice, both time included the winter. I swore I would never complain about the cold again if I only managed to get out of there.

Why would someone want to live somewhere where it's near zero for a week or more at a time, rising up to the mid twenties the rest of the time, for 3 or 4 months out of the year.

Lemme tell you something. Those people up there holed up in their houses over the winter a hell of a lot more than we here do in the summer. I would ask someone if they'd like to go ice skating, or for a walk, and they'd look at me like I was nuts.

heh....great minds....

Once it was around midnight, and my car wouldn't start. I'd been banging on the door of a large building (printing), that was open all night, but they couldn't hear me with all the noise inside. I was stopping there on the way home from my job, to visit my then husband, who worked there.

Anyway, I got back in the car to think (this was before everyone had cell phones, back in the early '80's.) I remember it was a windy night, really windy, along with temperature in the single digits. Even in the car it was getting really cold. I realized the nearest place with people was a gas station a mile away. I'm not kidding at all when I say I know I would not have been able to walk that far in the wind, cold, snow and ice. After what seemed like hours, someone inside opened the door to step outside for a smoke, and I got out and start yelling and waving my arms. He couldn't hear me between the wind and the sound of the machinery inside, and he almost didn't see me before he went back in.

I was like "As God is my witness, if I ever leave WI, I will NEVER come back here again."

I like the heat better too and only like air conditioning for a very short while. I never use my ac in my car no matter how hot it gets out. Living in WA, I am used to the rain. I don't bother with an umbrella or hood, I just get soaked.

Understood. but isn't that more of a complaint about noisy environments and personal safety? You gotta love having cell phones nowadays. That must have been so frustrating. Why didn't the print shop have an emergency bell or some warning system?

I ask this 'cause I'm looking to move from upstate NY as soon as I can. However, the 'normal' range of temps here in dead of winter...is zero deg f..once or twice in a winter...a fair amount of snow (avg 60-65 inches...varying a lot), a gorgeous temperate fall and summer temps that for maybe a week get over 90.

This partic. summer here is whacky...record cool temps (minus 5-10 deg f) and rain at some point in the day for 45 out of 56 days. Something like that.

I'm shopping for a new locale but don't want the extremes on the other end.

I have mixed feelings.

I'm an LA kid, was happy there. But in the middle of all that we lived in NYCity one year, where I remember it being 100 degrees with 100% humidity, and then it rained, and sledding down the hill in the school yard across the street. And then Chicago, humid in at least part of the summer and, in the early fifties, a lot of snow, ice skating (I memorized the day we skated at 7 below and that was before wind chill was a concept any of us knew). Then more years in LA (lots) and years in Humboldt County (my town varied between highs of 53 in winter and 63 in summer, more or less). You could call that boring but there was so much that wasn't boring, the bays, the forests, I wasn't bored. The air was often like crystal.

I've been to Palm Springs when it was 118 and went swimming (soon sorry about that, talk about lobster claws) and now live in a sometime blast furnace, Albuquerque, not as flaming as Phoenix. I could do without most of July and August, but now I think I'm more susceptible to heat than I was, say, at 24. Here in Albuquerque a lot of us live with swamp coolers, and those are more environmentally sane than icicle blast air conditioning.. which they had in inland LA too (San Fernando Valley, for example)... but I can't imagine swamp coolers being enough for Phoenix as they don't bring down the temp all that much.

My bro in law built a great house in the mountains behind Palm Springs, which had, at least back then, plenty of snow in winter - and he had one wood stove which also was a cookstove... and that was it for the whole place, although he did insulate well, if I remember right. There are colder places, of course.

I think I was sometimes colder, chillier, in Humboldt County where I was watching my gas bills with bug eyes than I was ever in Chicago or New York. There we were toasty inside in winter and bundled up outside, whereas in Humboldt, not that much of either.

As far as energy expenditure, any one here address how Phoenix is in Winter? I'm guessing not all that wild an expense as one would have in, say, Minnesota.

I think Phoenix in dead of winter is 67 deg f and 45deg for a high/lo temps. I was in Sedona (slightly diff/wetter climate) on January 10-16th and it was 55-65 deg during the day and 35-40 deg at night.

I found this interesting climate info:

"Phoenix has an arid climate, with very hot summers and temperate winters. The average summer high temperature is among the hottest of any populated area in the United States and approaches those of cities such as Riyadh and Baghdad. The temperature reaches or exceeds 100°F (38°C) on an average of 110 days during the year, including most days from late May through early September, and highs top 110 °F (43 °C) an average of 18 days during the year."

"On average, Phoenix has only 5 days per year where the temperature drops to or below freezing. The long-term mean date of the first frost is December 15 and the last is February 1; however, these dates do not represent the city as a whole because the frequency of freezes increases the further one moves outward from the urban heat island. Frequently, outlying areas of Phoenix see frost, but the airport does not. The all-time lowest recorded temperature in Phoenix was 16 °F"

As a (perverse) comparison, Albany suburbs (3 hr north of NYC) average high temp in the dead of winter is 20-25 deg F and 10-15 at night. We rarely have a 100 deg f high and might see a high of a 90 temp a few times. Oddly this year, we saw 90 in late April..and have only seen 80 a few times since and none in May and only a few timess in June or July.

Go figger!

No, it's noting that someplaces have very high temperatures 3 months of the year, and some places have very low temperatures 3 months out of the year.

Some might ask how someone could live in the heat for such a length of time stuck inside with A/C.
Others may ask how someone could live in the cold for such a length of time stuck inside with the heat on.

You missed my point....I wasn't talking about noisy environments, I was talking about the fact that there were many many times when it was so cold that people could not stay outside, even with the normal winter clothing, for any length of time without getting hypothermia.

Just like in the heat you can spend any length of time outdoors in normal summer clothing.

9 months of the year it's really nice in both places.

Yeah, Texas is too hot in the summer.
Wisconsin is too cold in the winter.

People live in both places, and call it home.

San Diego.

Actually I'd play outside in the frozen tundra all the time when I was a kid. Just bundle up and go out there. Ice skating, sledding, skiing, and a whole lot of snow stuff (tunneling, igloo-building, snowtag, etc.) Again back to acclimation -- I just got used to it, and always thought my mom put too much stuff on me (I'd lose scarves and hats left and right). Never suffered any ill effects until I refused to wear gloves for some weird teenage reason on a long cross-country ski trek in frigid temperatures, and got some minor frostbite.

I'd go to my grandma's house in Florida every spring break -- still plenty cold in MN in March -- and I'd always marvel at how insanely freezing it was when I'd get BACK to MN. Never thought much of it before I left. Then after a couple of weeks I'd acclimate again, and a couple of weeks after that spring would arrive.

I didn't have a car in college and would always walk/ ride my bike through the winter. I do remember seriously horrible temps when it hurt to be outside -- -50 windchill days -- but those are the exceptional "eek" days against a backdrop of many, many days that hovered around zero.

I know that I acclimated to cold, I'm not surprised that people acclimate to heat, though I have less experience with that. (It gets very hot here, and in MN and IL, but not for long.)

Ditto that. It's as if there were an outdoor thermostat.


But as much as I bitch and moan, I still like the four seasons of New England.

Of all places I have lived, I prefer the weather of Providence, RI. It was wonderful the year I spent there.

I forgot to note that I lived for six months in La Jolla, which is immediately north of San Diego, close by the shore - actually across the street. That was a very similar climate to my much longer time in Venice, which is a coastal town that is part of Los Angeles.

I liked both climates, and crave living by the ocean - which I did in Humboldt County too. It is something of a continuing trial for me to not have the ocean here in Albuquerque - the Rio Grande, a mere dribble, is a couple of miles away - but I did get to enjoy it for a lot of my life. With Chicago there was the nearby lake, and with NYCity there was the Hudson River, again maybe a block away - but they didn't get into my brain synapses the way the Pacific Ocean did. I walked Venice Beach probably 2,000 times over the years there.

Yeah, I do miss that about L.A. The ocean and the mountains were redeeming features, though I disliked the weather after a while. (Fine at first, it was the unchangingness that got to me.) I was far from the ocean -- a significant and trafficky drive -- but so wonderful when we got there.