It is so hot...

that while I ran multiple errands, I carried the caramel chocolates I bought with me into the next few stops rather than leave them in the car.

That's hot!

So far, I've been lucky. I live about a block from Lake Michigan, and my living room, dining room, and study all face towards the lake. I have found that even when it's been in the 80s and low 90s, I can just open windows. I have not had my air conditioners on yet this summer. It's been awfully muggy today, though, so I turned on ceiling fans.

We had a lengthy period with no rain, and now we're getting it almost every day. We had tornadoes several days ago (fortunately not near me) as well as some tornado warnings. Crazy weather.

I can't believe the Pacific Northwest is getting 100º+.

>2 lilithcat: So hot last week there was steam on the kitchen windows.

Inland Michigan here, between Lansing and Flint. Very muggy. Fortunately heat has been bearable. I also have a small fan going in the bathroom. The shower vent fan isn't cutting it this week.

I did summer courses in Annapolis, MD. When I woke around 6 am in my air-conditioned room and saw condensation on the outside of the double-glazed windows, I knew that I wasn't going for a walk that morning.

In Kenya at the moment it's (relatively speaking) very cold, with a low of 11C today where I live, but I'm just back from South Sudan where the temperature was in the thirties. I saw a news article the other day saying it was 46C somewhere in Canada, and that reminded me of when I used to live in Khartoum, where 46 was a relatively common temperature in the hot season, sometimes rising to 48, in a city where there was often no electricity, so no air conditioning. You learn to live with it, and you adjust your lifestyle and pattern of work to cope.

For me, it's not the heat that's the problem; it's the humidity.
I'm in central Texas, 250 miles from the Third Coast. Normally, when I walk the 75 feet from my front door to get the mail, I need to bring a liter of icy cold water with me so I'm not desiccated like a Peruvian mummy by the time I get back to the front door.
But there's been rain (mostly scattered showers) for the better part of a month now, and another week (at least) of this to go. And whereas the temperatures are only in the high 90s during the day, the humidity is up around 70%, even now.
So, what's our idiot of a governor doing? Diverting $250 million in funds to build a wall at the border instead of using it to shore up the electrical grid. Meanwhile, we're all dealing with near-daily rolling blackouts. In the past month, the power has gone off several times, the two longest being 16 and 12 hours.
Did I mention I live in an all-electric neighborhood?

>6 WholeHouseLibrary: I was in Dallas for two weeks on business once. Utterly dreadful. Temps in the upper 90s and humidity like a hot shower you can't escape. It was during the World Soccer Cup, and the hotel was full of Germans. One poor man was headed out the door dressed in black, long pants, long sleeves, hat, with a bag of golf clubs. He thought the long sleeves would keep him cooler, poor dear. I managed enough German to convey the dangers, and he went back inside.

I am sorry that the grid is not a priority with Gov. Abbott. People in TX have been hit with too much lately!

I knew a fellow in Doha (which I think is even hotter than Dallas, and can be as humid) who used to go out in the sun at lunch time wearing a dark suit. I twitted him about it once and he argued that it actually kept him cooler. I didn't believe him then and don't now.

OTOH, people complaining about the heat: in this English 'summer", it's 18 Celsius degrees (65 Fahrenheit) today and cloudy.

I am reminded of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkEd3WgR8qw

>9 lilithcat:

Thanks for reminding me. When people would occasionally make that comment to me, "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun", while strolling in the heat of the Sudanese day I would reply, "I'm an Englishman; what's your excuse?"

And the colleague I mentioned in #8 wasn't an Englishman: he was an Australian of Afghan extraction.

I tried to serve wine at room temperature to some guests last night and it is so hot that when I uncorked the bottle all that came out was a lot of grape smelling steam. Looking on the bright side, the sidewalk is so hot that all I had to do was put some tinfoil on the concrete and place the steaks on top - they were well done in no time at all. :-)

I remember back in the old days in Brisbane the afternoon paper sometimes did the stunt of frying an egg on the pavement on a hot afternoon.

>13 haydninvienna: That stunt used to make the local papers from time-to-time in the US as well.

>8 haydninvienna: That is curious, because if you just google Arab attire, you see both men and women in long dark robes and long white robes, both. I wonder if it is a religious preference?

But I will tell you that many farmers in my area wear long-sleeved flannel shirts (with t-shirts underneath) every single day, summer or winter....not solid black, but red and black checked. And wool socks!

>15 Tess_W:

When I lived in a small town in the desert in western Sudan, a place called En Nahud, I often used to wear the long white robe, the jallabia. Very comfortable.

>15 Tess_W: "Arab attire" varies a good deal regionally*. The standard in Qatar was white thobe for men and black abaya for women, with appropriate head coverings for each, but that's only the start: naturally enough, people of higher status or greater wealth tend to wear better quality or more elaborate or more colourful variations. Try googling for a picture of the current Emir, Sheikh Tamim Al-Thani. Note even the names vary: what I just called a thobe is also called a dishdasha. The spellings also vary. Even that's not the limit. Our PR director at the Regulatory Authority told me once that they had had a short video made about something and there was a fellow in it in Arab dress. One of the Qatari men on the RA staff immediately said "What's that fellow doing in our video? He's an Emirati!"—that is, from the UAE rather than Qatar. Our colleague had identified the actor as an Emirati from some detail of his clothing, but we never got around to asking what.

And let me tell you: a Qatari man in a well-fitting thobe is one of the world's mot elegant individuals, at least if he hasn't run to fat. While I was there I made a settled policy of dressing as well as I possibly could within my own culture, since I didn't want to let the side down by comparison.

Just for sort of fun, here is the Regulatory Authority website. At the top of the landing page you have a Qatari talking to an anonymous head. The Qatari is a guy named Jassim (he used to sit next to me); the back-of-head belongs (I think) to a Finnish guy named Pertti. If you scroll down the page, you see a smaller picture of a man in a dark suit flanked by 2 women. The woman on the man's right is Lebanese; the other woman is Qatari and is wearing the standard black abaya; the man is Irish. In the picture on the right, the 3 seated men are, from picture left, Italian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan. Very much an international organisation.

Googling for "(country) dress" might get you some country-specific hits, but I bet Google still wouldn't reliably distinguish Qatar/UAE/Kuwait/Bahrain/Saudi Arabia/Oman.

*And is not the same as "Muslim attire". "Arab attire" is basically that of Arabia; that is, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region.

Incidentally, it's not specifically religious. On one of her trips to Qatar my wife bought a couple of abayas from a women's clothing store in Doha. The shop staff had no problems at all with selling them to an unbeliever. She bought them from Almotahajiba, whose website will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about abayas. For calculating prices, "QAR" means the local currency, the Qatari riyal, which is pegged at 3.64 to the US dollar.