A tad chilly

Sounds like April's running cold lots of places.  That was my impression here too-- these last couple days are 20 F below normal, and the entire week coming up will be well below normal too.  But I just added up the heating degree days for the first 17 days of April and I see it's actually been a warmer-than-normal month so far-- total heating degree days are 462.5 through yesterday, vs. a "normal" of 503.5  .  Those data are from a station about 25 miles north of me, which is legitimate to use for longer-term temperature averages (though not precipitation-- there can be substantial snow differences between my house and there).

It hasn't been down to -7 C here since the end of March, but it's still dipping well below freezing each night this week. -11 C sounds cold for April.  Funny how welcome that temp would have been 2 or 3 months ago!

Do you work in the energy industry Cystem?  I've never seen anyone reference HDDs casually like that before.

Nah-- I just like weather and keep a few simple daily stats in a spreadsheet, and HDD is an easy column to calculate and useful for comparing month-to-month and year-to-year, or for any multiple day or week period vs. "normal" for the same period.

Oh, man, been there.  Extra caution is also required at the urinal.

I once swiped my contact lenses out with jalapeno oil on my figers, and because my fingers didn't actually touch my eyes I didn't realize... until the next morning when I put them back in.

Everyone has made that mistake at least once it seems.

I've read that Jamaicans laze about the hot beaches, cutting scotch bonnets into thin slices and drinking rum between the hot rushes. I think I'd fit right in. Hey, it's not that hard to indulge a big patch of slow and easy.

June in beertopia:

The rain mostly shut off (we are +10 inches above normal after a wet Spring) but still coolish, but that's pretty comfortable as a few or a bunch of degrees below low 70s normal average high is fine for me.

The vegetable garden is slow, as I had expected. They need lots and lots of sun.

No habaneros planted as they are a long season crop for us. Just tomatoes, cukes, and a bell pepper. May do some peas later on.

I'll post you up if we get much above 100 degrees later on.

I didn't realize it there was that much more rain than normal in your region.  The southern Mississippi and now North Dakota have pretty much been hogging the excess water spotlight so far this season.  Anybody else got any current or recent water woes?

Even my neck of the woods is feeling the current heat wave hitting the upper midwest/Great Lakes region.  I don't get the dangerous heat that's being experienced not all that far south of here, but it's miserable enough for me.  I woke up a couple hours ago (2 a.m.) drenched with sweat-- temp is 70F and 98% humidity in the middle of the night.  Yesterday topped out at 88F (heat index at 97F), so at least it's staying below the 90s, which is a lot better than what the lower peninsula is experiencing.

I see right now (4:00 a.m.) it's 78F in Ann Arbor, which I know from my years living there makes for horrible sleeping weather.  They're projected to be in the mid to upper 90s all week, and 100+ by the end of the week.

OK southerners, tell us about some real heat you've got going right now so I can feel better by comparison. 

That is brutal, and I see that The Dakotas and nearby states are above 110.

In the Pacific NW we are just the opposite.

In what is reliably our hot and dry time of year, we didn't make it out of the 60s Sunday, and we got close to 1" of rain, capping several similar days of cool and rainy weather.

It's not bad people weather, all in all. I don't want to trade.

The vegetables aren't going to go anywhere with such weather though.

I saw a time-lapse video of that storm coming into Phoenix-- I think it was on the CNN.com website.  It looks like a scary thing to have coming at you.  At least when you see a tornado coming from a couple miles away there's still only a small chance that it will actually strike your exact site.  But there's no way a 15-mile-wide wall is going to miss.

I spent a couple summers in Denver in the mid-1980s doing research, and it would routinely get into the mid-90s, but dry 95 in Denver is a lot more pleasant than humid 85 in Michigan.  There's no such thing as a day above 80 in Michigan that isn't humid to the point of dripping.

My research was at the Denver Federal Center, which is somewhat misnamed, as it's actually in Lakewood a few miles to the west and thus gets a little more mountain-effect than does Denver.  One mountain effect is short afternoon storms that seem to hit almost every day, lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple hours.  Every afternoon the Federal Center's automatic sprinklers would come on at 3:45, which was often while daily afternoon rain shower was still underway.

The max temp that I've experienced locally is 107, but we don't get humid here so it was just damn hot, not hellish.

When I was in the Guatemalan jungles it got up to 114, and it was humid. Mostly I just lay in my hammock and feebly tried to make my own breeze by swinging back and forth. It was too hot to be walking about but when I did, under the canopy of trees and on the layer of leaf litter that trapped moisture, the heat kicked up one more level. It really was a sauna-effect. Just sapping.

In the latest heat wave, Iowa topped 131 on the heat index (temperature+humidity). Truly miserable, but when I looked up the record for heat index it was Saudi Arabia in 2003--176 degrees!

Lord.

Saudi Arabia and surrounding region is like an interplanetary foreign-weather zone-- those temperatures belong on another planet.  But I didn't realize they also got such high dew points that heat indices could be boosted still much higher than the actual temperature.  Imagine an outside temperature that "feels" hotter than the temperature at which I cook roasts and pork strips in my slo-cooker!

Of course one of the big problems for U.S. (and other) troops in Iraq was/is heat, especially with all the gear and protective clothing they carry and their high levels of activity, at least at times.  I remember an article a few years ago that discussed how the U.S. troops' abilities to function in the heat was looked on almost in awe by the Iraqi civilians and soldiers, just the opposite of what I would have expected for people suddenly thrust into a climate so much hotter than anything they had ever experienced.  The article chalked it up to good conditioning, training, and constant monitoring of individuals' condition by the Army and Marines, but said many Iraqis were convinced it had to be some American technological marvel like an air conditioned uniform or a pill that made one immune to the heat, and they would ask if they could have any such spare uniforms or pills.

I could use something like that... I work in the heat and it's been near or over 100 degrees with about 80% or better humidity for the past two weeks.  Been keeping hydrated by chugging water & gatorade.

Ugh.  It's 1:15 a.m. and the temperature just outside my front porch is 82.2 F.  It's actually gone up a couple degrees in the past half hour.  So much for the interior of my house getting a chance to cool down overnight.

I see quite a few cities in the lower peninsula currently at 85-87 F.

 Sounds like a day for...

Summer in beertopia has continued cool, temps rising to about average max at best.

We had no July days reaching 90 degrees, and tomorrow will be the first day when we reach 90 for August.

After that we are supposed to drop down again.

On the bright side there has been no need to cool the house, but the tomatoes and cukes are about 4-5 weeks behind.