Adventures in Hotness

No, I'm not talking about myself, although, yes, I am totally hot. I'm talking about the weather, boys and girls!

One thing I've always liked about Illinois is its relatively mild summers. It's no Vancouver here, but it is relatively mild compared to, say, Kentucky, for example. Typically we're about five degrees cooler here, and that makes all the difference. Usually in Illinois, you only feel especially thankful for air conditioning for about a week or two; the rest of the summer you can make out just fine without it.

We have had our quota of hot weather already. In fact, we already had it by June. We had a real scorcher at about the time when I defended my thesis, and that wasn't the first. If I recall correctly, it was incredibly hot right around Memorial Day too.

This month has been miserable, too. It's been hot and dry most of the month. Thanks to Dennis (the hurricane) we had some relief for a day or two, but now we're back in the swing of things, with 99.99999% humidity to boot.

The only time that I recall the weather being so miserable here is when I came back after a summer in New Mexico. It's hot in New Mexico, but it is so dry that the apparent temperature is actually lower than the actual temperature. Out there, your sweat actually evaporates and cools you off! Coming back here to cooler temperatures but high humidity was awful.

Last year, we had an extraordinarily cool summer. There were a couple of weeks in August in which the temperature never rose above 75. Maybe we're getting paid back for the easy time of it we had last year.