Okay. Austin is hot. And it’s not hot in that dry-heat way that Las Vegas is hot. It’s kind of humid here and it’s about 100 degrees. The restaurants and bars keep a mist going through their fans until the sun goes down, which makes the heat tolerable. But it doesn’t get much cooler when the sun goes down and the misters get shut off. As a result, the temperature goes up. And walking into the air conditioning feels good for about a minute. After that, you’re hot again. As for the city, it is a lot like Wilmington, Delaware. It’s seems to be about the same size and it has the same kind of skyline. The food is much better in Austin, though.
Now I have to go find Man Eegee. He’s around here somewhere.
Well, I moved out of Austin pretty much because there are two seasons down there. The Cool Season, which lasts from roughly mid-December to sometime in April, and The $300 Air Conditioning Season, because that’s about what we were paying in electric bills when we left. Most of that was to cool the house. Not cooling the house was not an alternative, assuming we wanted to sleep and have refrigerated food and in fact do anything but lie there in a puddle and complain about how hot it was.
I remember walking home from work one night. For a while my wife and I worked for the same company, and we split up the shifts so someone would be at home with the kids all the time. I chose the night shift because it was marginally cooler. Even so I would walk home from work at 3 or 4 in the morning, listening to the radio, and it would still be 80 degrees out.
But I loved the people, the music, the general ambience. If it hadn’t been for that killer heat, I would have had a hard time leaving.
Say hi to Manee for me.
hi back! hope we can meet someday
I once lived in one of those Texas cities near the Gulf..and usually there’s two seasons summer and December.
I remember Austin being a little milder than that. We actually had snow once, the roads froze once or twice,and the first year we lived there we wrote my parents to tell them the kids were down at the pool swimming on December 1st. Three weeks later we were boiling that pool water to wash dishes with after our pipes froze in an ice storm — just in time for my wife’s sister to come to Texas for a visit. It was actually warmer in the part of Idaho she came down from while she was there than it was in Austin.
But still, I remember being able to go out and see the bluebonnets in the Hill Country in April and thinking it wasn’t too hot then. But it certainly didn’t last into May. (I guess this stands to reason, since Austin is at about the same latitude as Cairo. Egypt, not Illinois.)
I think I lived through this freeze also. Ended my attempts at indoor gardening forever (not compatible with cats in any case.
I still love Austin, though. But it would take a great deal to put us back there in July.
I spent a summer in Houston in an apartment without even a swamp cooler, just fans. Summer of ’59. I was attending summer school at Sam Houston High? to pick up trig and retake the 2nd semester of Spanish as a brush up. I had very little fat on my body then. My mother had rented an apartment in the area where she had lived during WWII when she worked in defense industries. But the neighborhood had seen better days. Shady streets with poorly maintained 2 & 3 story southern style single residence dwellings.
Morning was fine. The short walk to school was fine. Trig was first and it was comfortable. The school had no air conditioning. Spanish was tolerably comfortable and I had a good teacher. School was out by noon and I had a very warm but shady walk home. I would take a shower when I got home, but could never get dry. That is my strongest memory of summer in Houston.
I suspect that my mother had not remembered how hot and humid it got during the summer. My younger brother was staying with cousins, who had a swamp cooler. My youngest brother was with us. She had paid in advance and only taken the apartment so I could take the courses as a resident. Houston is often said to be uninhabitable for much of the year without air conditioning. From experience I agree.
Yes, very humid. But the green chile beer that LP from FBIHOP brought for our room is a delicious salve to the heat.
I will be wearing this shirt at Netroots this am.
I only do one thing Straight
Can’t wait to see that T live! 🙂
Well, that and the Elton John glasses should make you easy to spot. 🙂
Oh, RF, love that t-shirt. Wish I could see you in it, and raise a glass to Molly Ivins.
Wish I was there. 🙁
At least the humidity has relented here in the Hudson Valley.
I’m surprised they don’t use that as slogan in their tourism campaigns. “Come visit Ausin! It’s like Wilmington, but hotter!” The tourist dollars would pour in. It’s like a license to print money.
yeah, that’s what I’m saying…
you’ve got some licking to do
Get yourself some ribs and brew at Stub’s. It will take the sting out of the heat and put joy in your belly.
Check near the bar 😉
heh, that’s where I went to go look for him…
Of course, he ended up being the one to find me with glass in hand and chit-chatting with other blogfolk after awhile. Good times.
first vegas in august, then chicago in august, then austin in july…
who plans this shit?
what about minneapolis-st. paul in august? or san francisco? or aspen, colorado? or mt. washington, nh?