Back in the Oven

Back in the Oven

We are currently experiencing a late season heat wave. The Excessive Heat Warning sign is posted and it looks as though today is the first of what is expected to be a four-day streak where this hilltop high temperature is expected to exceed 100 degrees. It says it’s 101 right now. Someone finally published a temperature map that seems to confirm what I have always known since moving out here. On a hot day, our ridge line is about 10-20 degrees warmer than the towns on the ocean and about 10-20 degrees cooler than the towns in the deserts to the east. We went to Oceanside today with our friends Tom & Brenda, who are on their final roadtrip (ending in San Francisco) that will get them to the Cunard Queen Elizabeth II, which will take them to Sydney. We walked on the beach and on the pier in what was approximately 80 degree weather. By the time we got back to our hillside in the early afternoon, it was 100 degrees up here and the inland areas of places like Borrego Springs were 116 degrees. Any way you slice it, we are experiencing a heat wave. I read today that 2024 is far and away the hottest year on record…take that climate change deniers!

In theory we could cool down by going into the hot tub, which is in a nice shaded spot between the boulders. The hot tub app says that the water is 87 degrees, so there won’t be any need to turn the heat on. My friend Faraj, who has a small infinity edge pool that is exposed to the sun all day tells me that his pool is 107 degrees today. I’m not sure this is a day to do anything except enjoy the indoor air conditioning, which is keeping the house nice and cool. Just to make it even more comfortable, the Big Ass fans are moving the air around and that little extra breeze helps immensely as well. It will be interesting to see if barbecuing the sausages on the patio grill will be unbearably hot, but I suspect that the large palapa we have out there will help keep it a bit more comfortable. This is an interesting transition for us into fall since we are here for a bit more than another week before we fly off to Nova Scotia. I see its 63 and clear in Halifax right now, but that’s cheating since its 8pm. Looking out to our first three days there in mid-September, the weather app says that it will be 56-72 degrees with what looks like a 20-30% chance of rain. In other words, all we have to do is get through this little heat wave and we will be moving into a considerably cooler climate with an equally considerable increase in humidity. Since that will be a motorcycle trip, I am sincerely hoping that that humidity only results in a minimal amount of precipitation. I am assured by the motorcycle rental guy in Nova Scotia (a Scotsman from the sound of him) that September is generally a lovely month in Nova Scotia. My research tells me that there are 5 days of rain in a normal September in Nova Scotia, and nothing about this year’s weather patterns imply that it will be any wetter than that this year.

The last motorcycle trip I took was in June of 2023 when we went to ride from Phoenix to Las Cruces, New Mexico and back. It was pretty hot for that ride with temperatures in the low 90s that really knocked the stuffing out of me. I think that even if it rains a little up in the Maritime Provinces, it will be a damn sight better than that for this ride. It will actually be a very pleasant break for us, both from the heat and as a transition into the next season. In addition to that, given that I have fond memories of growing up and living in Maine for three years (not to mention my many years in Ithaca, which is very similar weather), and Kim has fond memories of her days performing in Vermont summer stock theater, it should all be a nice trip back in time for us.

It’s interesting how we all look at temperature as a primary guide for where we want to live, especially in our retirement years. The two big choices for people that want to seek out the warmer weather and avoid the ravages of cold winters are generally Florida or Arizona, representing the tropical and the desert environments, the difference being less about temperature and more about humidity. The truth is that I don’t like either the tropical humidity of Florida nor the excessively dry heat of the desert in places like Arizona. One gives me headaches and makes my joints ache and the other dries out my nasal cavities and gives me nose bleeds. That is one of the reasons we settled on San Diego. It is considered a sub-tropical environment and therefore a very temperate climate. Within the confines of San Diego County there is fairly broad range of micro-climates that range from the more tropical by the ocean to the more desert inland. That is all consistent with those temperature bands I already mentioned. In choosing to live in the North County area where this hilltop is located, we have really straddled the two extremes and can see that in the flora that inhabits our property. Cacti and succulents, while botanically related, seem very much to be at opposite ends of the climate spectrum from one another. Both do extremely well here on the hilltop. That gives the hilltop a strange feel of being simultaneously an arid and a lush tropical environment that sort of keeps people guessing about just what sort of ecosystem we have here.

I like coming out the door of the house in the morning and having it be warm, but not hot (we get fussy when we get older). I like having a nice cooling breeze, which we are fortunate to have much of the time on this hilltop location. Usually the breeze if off the ocean, which naturally makes it cool, but once in a while the wind comes off the mountains to the east in what is usually called a Santa Ana wind that is warm and dry. That can be equally pleasant, but more in a soothing way than a cooling one.

Mike and Melisa keep their house cool and dark naturally. They are somewhat imbedded into the hillside on one side and that is always a very sound and natural way to control a houses’ temperature. We are on the hilltop and other than stucco construction, which has some natural insulating benefits, we are pretty exposed to the elements, both hot and cold. Mike keeps his windows open at night, which is very sensible since the temperatures get easily down into the low 60’s and even dip as low as the high 50s’s at this time of year. As sensible as that seems, we are used to sleeping with the windows closed and the A/C cranking. It must be a learned behavior from all those years in NYC.

I set this story down to wish our friends Tom & Brenda a fond fair well as they head north towards L.A. today. We had a lovely and reminiscent time over the last two days. Tom and I commented about how much we are each in the same place, having gotten there through very different paths over the past fifty years. We had the chance to fill each other in on some of the blanks in our respective stories, but there was no denying the similarity of our current states of mind. We concluded that it had more to do with the similarities in the value structures of our parents and less about a few years in Rome at the same high school. In keeping with my oven theme today, I think that says that there are lots of ways to bake a cake and we all pass through the oven of life in one way or another. Looking back into the oven to try to figure out how that all happened is less productive than just acknowledging the similarities and enjoying whatever is left of the cake.