As a hot-weather nut, I'm always sorry to see the end of August, with the sun thinning and those trillion or so green leaves on the trees in front and back just glowering at me with menace, threatening to die and pile up on the ground like organic slag-heaps.
Heck, I start mourning the passing of summer at the end of July. And in the Northeast, summer has been no great shakes anyway. Pity the poor souls who spent large sums of money to get away to the shore, given more than a week of temperatures in August that barely got into the 60s, with a sun that barely peeked out from clouds.
Usually, as hot-weather nuts, my wife and I spend part of the summer (and winter, too) in southern Arizona. For various reasons, we didn't this year. But it's interesting to note that it was hot. Very hot. In Phoenix, the temperature has hit 110 or above on 29 days this summer, a record. (Please excuse the link to the local newspaper that infantalizes and anthropomorphizes even the weather: "We did it!" Gannett, of course).
Anyway, a cooling trend is coming.
Above, for Arizonans and others who like the desert, a reminder of what it looked like in Tucson when I got up one morning just seven months ago, on Jan. 22 -- the first snowfall in a generation. By 1 p.m., however, all traces of the snow were gone and the temperature was in the 70s.
Strange weather we're having.
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