~~snippets, nibbles & scribbles~~: How hot was it?

Well...........was it hot enough for ya?!

Pretty much every conversation I have had over the past few days has included some discussion about the record heat...suddenly everyone (clearly, myself included) is an amateur meteorologist - it's actually kind of funny how we seem incapable of discussing almost anything else! :)

And boy does everyone have an opinion, it is not at all simply, "hey, its' freakin' hot out" which should certainly cover the bulk of it, no no, it is actually all of the additional commentary and speculation about why it is so hot and what it all means...I heard every suspicion from random natural fluke to global warming and quite often to either proof of the nearing of the end of the world or the actual dawning of the age of Aquarius, I don't know why I find it so amusing and fascinating, but I do! :)

Also funny is how totally ill-equipt we coastal folk are to deal with high temperatures, for example: very few people here own fans or even have shade tree's for that matter and every store for miles was completely out of ice by early Friday afternoon. I have never seen so many hats, umbrellas, or barely/poorly dressed tourists (something I could definitely go the rest of my life happily without ever seeing again, by the way.) For 4 days, it was all quite something, but as of today, we seem to be all back to normal again. I began to wonder if the locals might start bowing to the returning marine layer, I'll admit, I was tempted.

So how hot was it? Well, us amateurs certainly made lots of guesses and predictions but the "experts" have now weighed in and the records are as follows for max temps in my small central California coastal town

Thursday - 107
Friday - 113
Saturday - 108

oh, and the average around here for this time of year is usually cold foggy mornings and early afternoons with a peek of sun in late afternoon and feeling lucky if we hit mid 70's. (thus the term: June Gloom)

Something I never thought I'd be able to say it that it was actually hotter here at the coast than in many places in the valley! We joked about going over to bakersfield to be tourists there since it was about 15 degrees cooler, I wonder what they would have thought of that! I heard so many people say things along the lines of "we came over here to get away from the heat, turns out we should have stayed home"

Small personal casualties of the heatwave:

the standard plastic/resin kitchen broom that I left outside leaning against the wall after sweeping the deck is now a mostly useless stick with a completely melted and oddly curled tip mildly resembling what used to be the brushes

my surfboard, even though in shade, all of the wax melted off the deck of the board, which would be fine except that all of my spare surfwax which was stored in my shed, also completely melted

Best things I saw this weekend:

A teenage boy on a bicycle (I'll assume a local) with a cut up t-shirt, on the back he had hand written the following: "Tourist, go home but leave your daughter"

Sundays at the Smokehouse are back: 6 singers, a mandolin player, stand up base player, tribal drummer, guitar player and several other contributors were gathered and making beautiful music on the corner by the beach today