It's too darn hot.

Today was the ninth day of a heat wave in Northern California, with temperatures well into the nineties everyday and the last three in triple digits at my house (and in the nineties well into the evening inside the house, as well). Given that, I think that this is an ideal time to go see Al Gore's movie about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth": the theatre has air-conditioning.*

Part of me does want to ponder climate change and the ethics of the global warming debate, and how we are called to be stewards of God's creation -- what does that mean? Unfortunately, I think all the synapses in my brain have melted.

The San Francisco Bay peninsula may be the only place in the world where people wake up on a summer morning, look out at 7 a.m. to a world lit up by bright, clear golden sunshine, and say, "Oh, damn." Conversely, gray, overcast skies mean hallelujah! that the clouds will burn off by lunchtime and the temperature will be lovely in the afternoon.

Yes, we're spoiled, climactically. It never gets really cold in the winter, and most years it doesn't get that hot except for a few weeks in late August and September. That's one of the reasons people stay here in spite of the insane cost of living. There are others -- such as being an hour from the beach and three from the mountains -- but that's a big part of it.

I grew up in Florida. I know I wouldn't want to live in that climate anymore, as much as I love the state otherwise. They do, however, have one advantage over my current neck of the woods: almost all the buildings are air-conditioned. Here, I -- and almost all of my friends -- live in unair-conditioned houses, and it's not uncommon for other places to lack climate control, either. Why air condition a house when most of the time you won't need it?

So forgive us our whining. The heat wave will be over soon (even as I write this, fog is rolling into the bay, meaning it will be cooler tomorrow), and we'll get back to our complaining about all the stuff we usually whine about -- the high cost of real estate, and what's going on in the tech industry, and why don't the Giants get rid of Barry Bonds?, and....




*I really wish that joke were original with me, but it's not; I saw it somewhere on Live Journal.