Soaring Temperatures Fire Heated Debate

[Warph]

It is a great triumph, when sizzling in the summer heat, if you are able to convince others that your heat is far more miserable than theirs. After all, who wants to be average? We are a people who pride ourselves in extremes.

When our daughter, who lives in the Southwest, mentions that it has been 104 degrees there again, I say, "Yes, dear, but it's a dry heat. If you want to really suffer, you should come home." (As though this is the way to lure your adult children back home.)

"What's the temperature there?" she asks.

"Well, it's only 88, but that's with 98 percent humidity. You walk out the front door in the morning and it feels like you're walking into a sauna fully clothed."

She says, "It's so awful here, we wait until 8 at night to go on a walk."

"What happens at 8?" I ask.

"The temperature cools to 96."

I tell her that the last time her father and I went for a walk, the allergens hanging in the air and clinging to the trees were so heavy that I inhaled and started choking. "Your father had to do the Heimlich on me," I say. "I coughed up a large pollen ball."

I have her with the pollen ball. She pauses for a second, and then ups the ante. "It's too hot for trees to grow here. Trees give shade and we don't have any shade either. You're lucky you have trees."

"What's lucky? We've had so many storms that every week we're out picking up tree limbs. You're the ones who are fortunate – dry heat and no trees!"

She counters that humidity is supposed to be good for your skin and prevent wrinkles. I told her I just passed by a mirror and have firm, or rather not so firm, evidence to the contrary.

I respond that dry heat is supposed to be good for your bones.

She says it may be good for your bones, but it's hard on your hands – some days you need a hot pad to touch the steering wheel and gear shift.

I ask if she read about that man who went out to get his mail barefoot and burned the bottom of his feet on his sidewalk.

She says yes and immediately notes that he was from their part of the country. "It's so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk here."

"That's nothing," I say. "Last night I steamed broccoli by holding it out the kitchen window."

I point out that at least they have that nice breeze that accompanies their comfortable dry heat.

"The nice breeze, as you call it, is like standing behind a jet engine," she says.

I thought I had smoked the high heat and sufferable humidity versus the dry heat and jet engine breeze debate when the window incident occurred. A frosted window in their bathroom, which faces east and absorbs the morning sun, cracked and spread like a spider's web, shattering the window into a thousand tiny pieces.

"The man replacing the window said it very well could have been from the heat," she says.

They win.

....Lori Borgman


LOL....Lori's daughter has to be living in Arizona.  I can relate very well to her argument


....Warph