Heat

At 5 p.m., it is 83 degrees in Seattle. Nice. Two days ago, it was 104 degrees at 7 p.m. A new record high for Seattle. My cats were fur puddles, splayed out on the kitchen floor, and I found my body dissolving in its own sweat. Not so nice.

Before you dark brown, hard-eyed, leather-skinned desert rats begin taunting us Northwesterners as a bunch of wilting begonias, let's get just a few things straight. In Seattle, we don't air-condition our houses, ok? Very few of us have swimming pools in our back yard. (Water tends to pool naturally around here, without our helping it out.) Lots of us -- believe it or not -- air-condition our cars by simply rolling down the windows. Nor are we Mediterraneans, with a culture of taking afternoon siestas, then staying up until after midnight so we can dine in the cool of the night. If the Good Lord meant us to eat our meals after 8 p.m., he'd never have given us late night TV and Midwestern accents.

Bad July weather around these parts has always meant rain -- not heat stroke.

So, as July limps to its scorched conclusion, it's a relief to see our temperatures drop back into the normal range. Now our only worry is that we've had virtually no rain since April, and our forests are dry as tinder.

Ooops, a slip. Did I say no rain since April? My apologies to the good xenophobic folks at Lesser Seattle, Ltd. Let me rephrase that: "Dang, it just rains all summer long up here -- you Californians are soooooo lucky you get to spend your summers down there in Paradise."