Running Down The Clock

Summer in the desert is starting to wind down, on this, the first week of September.  You wouldn't know it just from the temperature, because it was 110 degrees today.  It sure felt hot outside and the next couple of days are predicted to be moderately cooler, maybe all the way down to 108 degrees.  Summertime kind of quietly weasels its way into your life during the month of May, but it always needs to be dragged out - kicking, screaming and clawing the ground - all through September and half of October.

But there are subtle indications that the wheel of the seasons is beginning to turn.  It is becoming noticeably darker earlier these days.  When I left the gym yesterday at 6:55 pm the sun had already set, the first time that has happened since last April.  I read something where the sun's position in the sky doesn't change much from the summer solstice on June 21st through Midsummer Day (this year on August 6th).  After that date, the sun begins to move more swiftly in its southerly journey to the autumn equinox and then the winter solstice.

In the nighttime sky, when it's not full of monsoon clouds, the stars are starting to belie the passing months.  Scorpio the Scorpion is beginning to slink away toward the southwest horizon.  For just a couple of weeks, you can spot two beautiful crowns in the sky - Corona Australis, the Southern Crown, a little below the scorpion's glittering stinger, and Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, low in the western sky not far from the sparkling orange Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the sky.

The Great Square of Pegasus is starting to vault its way up the eastern sky.  A large, nearly perfect square, it's easy to spot and is a sure sign of autumn.  A little less obvious is the constellation of Andromeda, hanging on to one of the corners of the Great Square for dear life and trailing it as it rises in the sky.  With binoculars, it's not hard to spot a smudge of dim gray light in the boundaries of Andromeda, and the multi-million-year-old light which finally has made its way to your retinas after crossing a gulf of 12 quintillion empty, frigid miles.  This is the Andromeda Galaxy, an island universe of billions and billions of stars, similar in shape to our own home galaxy, the Milky Way, but even larger.

The two galaxies are part of what's known as the Local Group, a collection of dozens of galaxies bound together gravitationally in our own little neighborhood in space.  Astronomers are pretty sure Andromeda and the Milky Way are speeding toward each other, and will most likely collide in a couple of billion years.  Surprisingly, they also think the two galaxies will just pass through each other, the distance between individual stars being vast enough so that the probability of a star running into another star is extremely low.  But the collective gravitational tidal forces will be more than enough to bend and warp the two galaxies into very distorted shapes, and invariably millions of stars will be cast off into intergalactic space, to wander the deadly cold vacuum as rogue stars, in desolate solitude.  Over even more billions of years the two galaxies will dance and loop around each other, colliding over and over again.  Eventually, in the far distant future, the galaxies will merge into a super-galaxy and probably even the supermassive black holes in the two galactic centers will merge into one ultramassive black hole.

In fact, astronomers have spotted a couple of galaxies, 30 times farther away than Andromeda, which are in the process of colliding.  This ultra-slow train wreck of galactic proportions has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and will continue on for many more millions, leaving a huge mess of stars, gas, and dust strewn over an impossibly vast area of space:

So, sometimes I think about our home galaxy being on an unavoidable collision course with an even larger galaxy, and I dream about what that might look like, assuming Planet Earth is still in one piece and there will be humans living on it in a couple of billion years.  No matter who or what is around at that time, it will be the greatest show in the entire universe.  For now though, I have to be content with dreaming about the cool, crisp autumn mornings which are also slowly, inexorably inching their way to us, and the dramatic cranberry-colored sunsets which give way to dark, deep and chilly nights.  And the 110-degree summer days will be a distant memory.

My Day In Hell

It's time to gather the kiddies and the old people and the pets around the computer monitor, and settle in for a tale of nearly unparalleled awfulness and tribulation.  Yesterday was probably one of the worst days I've ever had to get through, and I'm still reeling from the head-spinning shock.  I'll keep the ugly details down to a minimum, since there is so much to slog through, but for now, suffice to say that day was a constant, dizzying stream of the truly wonderful and the truly awful.  So pour yourself a big ol' glass of battery acid, because it was definitely "one of those days."

Actually things started to get weird the previous day, Wednesday.  It started with an abandoned rabbit call at a run-down apartment building in north Phoenix.  It seems that some tenants moved out in the middle of the night and left their two rabbits to fend for themselves on a second-floor patio.  I'm not going to start on the kind of vile human detritus that would do that to a couple of rabbits they had as pets.  I guess for some people it's impossible to form an emotional bond with anything, and that is probably the worst punishment anyone could endure, living life without love and caring for anything other than your own worthless piece-of-shit existence.  Anyway, the people who called had no idea what to do and had no means of transporting them to the Humane Society, where they could be cared for.  So I said I would run a taxi service and take them.  The two bunnies were youngsters, one black and the other black and white, and were extremely friendly and sweet.  How someone could turn their backs on them and walk away without any concern for their welfare is so far beyond my comprehension I have no words.

After that was done, I got a call from one of our foster caregivers, Nancy, who was fostering Tilly and her four babies for Brambley Hedge.  It seems her home's air conditioning went out, something you definitely DON'T WANT to happen in Phoenix in July, and I had to get Tilly and her brood out.  I went to pick them up, and I also took in her 8-week-old kitten she is fostering.  The kitten is black with gold and green eyes, and just a bundle of limitless energy and play.  Little Krazy Kat thinks my pet doves are really fascinatng and particular my dove Lily, who has free range in the house.  Kitteh thinks Lily is the Best Thing Ever.  I haven't had a kitten in my house for a very long time and I had almost forgotten how much fun they can be.  Except when they wake up at 4am and won't stop meowing.  More on that later.

Late that evening around 11pm, when I was getting ready for bed, a monsoon storm kicked in outside and the rain started coming down and the wind started howling.  Monsoon storms can be violent and unpredictable, and this one was a doozy, with loud, crashing thunder and extreme lightning.  I was watching it out the front window when an enormous blast of lightning struck.  The entire sky turned a brilliant, emerald green for a split second, something I had never seen before, and it hit near a utility pole on the other side of my back fence, causing a power transformer to blow up.  There was a really loud explosion, and the entire block was plunged into blackness.  Losing all power is also something that you NEVER EVER want to deal with in the middle of summer.  When that happened, the first words out of my mouth were, "I am SO screwed."  I had no idea how true that would be.

So here I am in the sweltering darkness, unable to do much of anything.  I did go around and made sure the rabbits and the kitten were secured, and just had to wait it out.  I called the local electric company and they gave a restoration estimate of 3am.  It was too hot to stay in bed, so I tried laying on the ceramic tile floor in my bedroom.  It was the only way to stay cool, but sleep was impossible.  Around 1am the houses across the street got power back, but my side of the street is on a separate electrical grid, and we stayed in darkness.  Turns out, getting power back early wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

Three A.M. came around with no change, so I called the electric company and now they said 5am restoration.  Great, I thought, but really there was no choice.  I couldn't sleep and was starting to get headaches, backaches and leg cramps.  Bitch whine moan, I know, but you try sleeping on a hard floor for five hours and see how you feel.

Around 4am Kitteh woke up and did not know where she was, and started a constant meowing which continued until 7am.  I was starting to think I had died and gone to hell at some point.  Morning also brought a realization that my recycling bin, which I had placed out by the street for Thursday collection, had been knocked over and my trash had been blown up and down the whole street.

It began to get light outside and this long, horrendous night was coming to an end, but not before I noticed that the strong winds had ripped one of my garage doors nearly entirely off.  While I was fixing that, power was finally restored at 7:15am, and I thought I might be home free. But when I turned on the air conditioning - nothing.  It wouldn't start, almost like it had no power.  I ran back and forth desperately from the side of the house where the A/C unit was to my back patio where the circuit breakers were and could find nothing wrong.  I began to panic since I had over 20 rabbits in my house and the temperature was only going to go up from that point, and without a doubt my worst nightmare is having lots of bunnies in the house and no air conditioning.

I checked my land line phone and it too, was dead, no dial tone, just silence.  I thought well, due to the violent storm maybe there was a phone outage.  My cell phone still worked and I ended up calling BHRR friend and supporter Galen Boal, who runs an air conditioning repair business, and he very graciously came over at 8am and fixed my A/C and got it running.  He said he did it for the bunnies and would take no payment.  I can't express how thankful I am to Galen for his willingness to help and the donation of his time and expertise to keep the bunnies (and me) comfortable and cool.

So, with the A/C blasting lovely cool air throughout the house, I thought well, I may be out of the woods NOW.  Oh, that would hardly be the case...

I went to my desktop computer and turned it on to log in and check email, and the flat screen monitor would not turn on.  After a bit of checking I determine the power supply transformer was dead.  How odd, I thought.  So I went to my laptop but could not get to the Internet.  After a lot more checking I discovered that my wireless network and my broadband router were both fried.  Kaput.  Screwed.  I realized another of my nightmares had come true - a power surge.

When the lightning hit last night, it created a massive electromagnetic field for a split second.  Most of my electronic equipment runs on some sort of transformer, and since transformers are mostly big coils of copper wire, a current burst was induced and stuff got fried.  In fact that's what was wrong with my air conditioning, a 24-volt transformer in the main unit got toasted.  Luckily it was easily replaced, but my other equipment was out of luck.  Also luckily my HDTV, refrigerator and other big-ticket electronics were surge-protected, but I still lost a lot of electrical components, and I am still finding things that were destroyed by the surge.  Even the dimmer switch on the overhead light above my kitchen table was ruined.  A dimmer switch?  Really?

In the midst of all this I still had to pick up a bunny coming to our shelter from the Humane Society of Yuma at 11am.  A little gray Holland Lop, it had been kept in a cage with another, unneutered male rabbit who attacked and beat up the smaller rabbit without mercy.  Their idiot owner finally wised up and separated them, and dumped the smaller injured bunny off at the Humane Society, and from there to us.  Poor little guy, named Giblet, has numerous scars and bite marks all over his head and body, and some big lumpy scar tissue around his eye, but somehow, almost magically, Giblet is still very sweet, friendly and trusting.  It never fails to amaze me how resilient and accepting rabbits are to even the most horrendous, painful treatments.  His photo is below.

Later that afternoon my trusty laptop computer decided it was a good day to die, and did just that.  I got a dreaded Blue Screen of Death and then it would not boot up.  This laptop was at least 5 years old and pretty much had my life on it.  Luckily I did a major data backup last week when it was starting to act up, but I didn't expect it to die.  I think the hard drive is shot.  I definitely have gotten my money's worth from that computer, using it nearly every day for hours and hours, but still, I am going to lose so much stuff in terms of pictures and documents, it is so not fair.  It's in the repair shop right now and may there's something that can be done to save it, but I am not optimistic.  Damn.

By early evening I had just about had it.  I was running on adrenaline from no sleep the night before, and it was like being wired on speed.  I literally could not stop moving, my brain was stuck on overdrive and I had no appetite, even though I had not eaten at all that day.  I pushed myself to get the rabbits their salads and dinner, took a shower and crawled into bed, grateful that this singularly awful, horrible day was finally over.

This day really sucked but somehow, in the grand scheme of things, it could have been much worse.  All my rabbits were fine, I was okay other than being completely exhausted mentally and physically, and no one lost their life or got injured.  But still, so many bad, depressing, costly and unnecessary things happened and I lost so much from the power surge, it really is going to take time and a lot of money to get back to somewhere near where things used to be.  There's something about the beginning of July being the time that some really bad things happen to me.  Last year on July 6th was my automobile accident where my car was totaled, this year it was the Storm from Hell and the horrific aftermath.  Sometimes life really sucks, but as with everything, you find a way to get through it.

The Tide of Summer

Memorial Day weekend 2012 is upon us, and we in central Phoenix are enjoying an unexpected and most welcome respite from the triple-digit temperatures that burst on to us about a month sooner than they should. The high temperature yesterday was in the mid-80s, a good 14 degrees cooler than what's considered normal. When we get lower-than-normal temperatures in Phoenix anytime from May to October, we have something for which to be thankful.

About a week ago we were broiling through temperatures that reached 108 degrees. That does not bode well for the remainder of the summer, which stretches out in front of us like 500 miles of the ugliest, most pothole-ridden, unpaved road imaginable and we're in a broken-down Ford Pinto with no air conditioning.

The tide of summer is poised to sweep over all of us, like a tsunami of horribleness that we know is coming and are powerless to stop. Last year's summer was brutal, one of the very hottest on record. It's a sure sign of advancing age when I am having more and more trouble getting through this time of the year. I know it's a consequence of living in the desert and you would think after 19 years I would be fairly well accustomed to it, but I'm not, and it's just getting worse. I find myself thinking more often of moving to a more moderate climate, like in New Mexico. Santa Fe and Taos are calling to me, and they sound better and better with each passing degree.

During the very hottest days, which are from mid-June until the monsoon season kicks in mid-July, temps can approach 120 degrees. There are no circumstances under which that amount of heat can be considered necessary or appropriate. I mean, seriously, what's the point? What does a 120-degree temperature accomplish that a 112-degree temp can't? Anything past 114 feels like hot death anyway, what's the purpose of going any higher? Coupled with the fact that the overnight temp sometimes doesn't drop out of the lower 90s, and you got yourself a little slice of hell on earth.

Sometimes I think about other seasons when it gets really hot. It helps a little (though not nearly enough) to remember what it felt like back in December and January, when I would wear my flannel pajama bottoms, wrap myself in a favorite cardigan and sit on a warm blanket on the sofa, insulated from the sharp chill outside. Or during our short autumn in early December when you wake up on a bright, chilly morning and go out to see the tree leaves turning scarlet, burgundy, lemon yellow and russet against a turquoise sky adorned with puffy white cumulus clouds. Or our springtime, which starts around Valentine's Day, when the trees and shrubs are covered with richly-colored flowers, just waiting and hoping for any moisture to come down from the sky like liquid manna.

Yes, the tide of summer is coming, and Memorial Day is just the first stop of a long, arduous and debilitating journey, not into a heart of darkness, but a heart of blinding, blazing light and heat. I know there are good days and bad days to come, and just as summer follows spring, autumn will be following summer, although trying to catch of glimpse of it over the vast, parched, desolate wastelands of June, July, August and September, it seems impossibly far-off, like a mirage shimmering in the heat waves far in the distance. You walk toward that mirage and it seems to retreat farther away the closer you get. You will reach the mirage someday, but at a pretty steep price, as it seems like summertime sucks the life out of you like a vampire that hasn't eaten for several centuries and has just been given 15 minutes in a blood bank.

The Edge of Summer

It's the last weekend of May. Memorial Day comes late this year, on May 30th. It's breezy and just slightly warm outside on this very sunny Sunday afternoon, and the breezes make everything feel great. We're having a bit of a cool front come through, and we're going to fall short of the normal high temperature of 98 degrees by a good 10 to 12 degrees. We will certainly take the temporary cool spell with a lot of gratitude and will enjoy the heck out of it while it lasts, which will be all too fleeting.

Nobody is being fooled, though, by the nice weather. I've been living here going on 18 years and I know full well that another ghastly, blisteringly hot Arizona summer is waiting in the wings to crush our spirit and our will to live with its harsh, unrelenting, oppressive, choking heat. We have to put up with things that are incomprehensible to the rest of the country, such as stepping outside at 10 p.m. at night to a temperature of 102 degrees and being hit in the face with a blast of hot air not unlike sticking your head into a furnace. Or a nighttime "low" temperature of 94 degrees. You just know when you wake up at 6 in the morning and it's already 97 degrees outside that your day is going to be hell.

There will usually be at last one or two days at the end of June when the high temperature will hit 117 or even a little higher, which is ridiculously, preposterously hot. Anything over 115 degrees is unnecessary overkill, and serves no useful purpose other than to torture us. In mid- to late-July the monsoon season will start, and that is when the humidity creeps upward, making everything even more disgustingly awful that it already is. Those are days when a stifling blanket of heat covers everything and lulls you into a sleepy, hypnotic limbo, not sure if you're ever going to wake up again. And finally, during late August and early September everyone is so absolutely sick of summertime and the heat that we are ready to kill each other. Right now in late May, sitting on the Edge of Summer, we are all too familiar with what will be coming our way, and some of us are not too happy about it.

But despite the murderous, hateful aspects of our summer, there are actually some good things that happen here during June, July, August and part of September. Summertime is when we get the most colorful sunsets of the year. Because of the summer wind kicking lots of dust into the air, the sunsets are remarkably vivid and glow with unexpected and mesmerizing shades of green and purple. When the monsoon moves in it brings different layers of moisture and clouds in the atmosphere and at sunset the sky is an astonishing artist's palette of colors - crimson, deep orange, royal blue, gold, cranberry, magenta, cream and light gray. Monsoon sunsets are the best, and some of them will drop your jaw open with their magnificence.

Then there are the monsoon storms themselves. You can watch them building up over the Mogollon Rim northeast of Phoenix, in big, fluffy accumulations of storm clouds that look like immense heaps of custard in the sky. If we're lucky, these storms will collapse at sunset and come screaming down the Rim into the Valley, and then everything goes batshit crazy. Short-lived but extremely intense storms, with torrential rain, violent thunder and lightning, and near hurricane-force winds can make for an interesting, albeit hair-raising, evening. But the reward for putting up with Mother Nature's little freak-outs is a very welcome and wonderful 20-degree drop in temperature. We live for those cool, damp nights after the storm.

If we're really lucky, we will be able to watch a thunderstorm in the distance, too far away to affect our local weather, but close enough to see everything that's going on inside. It's so very interesting and beautiful to watch the distant thunderhead, made up of billowy gray clouds, being laced with lightning bolts which illuminate internal portions of the cloud bank and present a never-ending light show of bizarre shapes and colors. I remember watching one particularly beautiful round thunderhead, like a giant mushroom, flicker and flash with internal lightning bolts while being framed by a beautiful turquoise blue sky, the crescent moon and evening star. One of the most breathtakingly beautiful things I have ever seen, and completely free.

Our Mexican friends and neighbors to the south certainly had the right idea with their custom of the siesta, or afternoon nap. During the very hottest part of the day, when going outside is only something that you do when the inside of your house is on fire or there are a million dollars in the middle of the street waiting to be picked up, what better thing to do than snooze through it with a nice, long nap? The rabbits do this all the time, and I have to say it has a lot of merit.

We Arizonans will always whine and gripe about our summertimes, just as Minnesotans or Wisconsinites complain about their harsh winters or residents of southern states carp about their swamp-like humidity, but as we always do, we will get through the summer and the cool, crisp days and nights of autumn will be our eventual, inevitable reward. And as always, we will find ways to extract a little bit of fun and pleasure from the Edge of Summer.

After the Fourth

Well, we got through another Fourth of July here in our little corner of paradise. We kind of lucked out this time, because it was sunny, clear and not blindingly hot. Of course the Phoenix version of "not blindingly hot" would cause widespread anxiety in most other parts of the country. We were actually a couple of degrees cooler than average - 104 degrees instead of 107 - but we will take any kind of "cooler" we can get. In most other parts of the country Independence Day sort of marks a half-way point through the summer season. But since we are graced with summertime temperatures through the first half of October, July 4th represents about one third down, two thirds yet to go.

We desert dwellers are now looking to the skies to bring us some relief in the form of the oft-promised but just as often missing-in-action monsoon storms. We get giddy with anticipation around midday as we watch the cumulus clouds pile up in massive, custard-like heaps in the northeast, hoping that later in the afternoon we will be treated to huge, torrential downpours and intense winds. In quite a few cases, all this drama and expectation is nothing but a big tease as storms pop all around us, but avoid the Valley of the Sun as if it were a big leper colony.

It's day 77 of the Gulf oil spill and the undersea well is still blowing oil into the water. It seems barely possible that this can continue for so long, and one wonders where all those millions and millions of gallons of crude oil are going. You can tell that news fatigue is starting to set in - the oil spill gets relegated to a spot on the news programs after the annual hot-dog eating contest and the latest professional athlete signing some preposterous, obscene gazillion-dollar contract.

By the way, is there anything as loathsome and disgusting as an eating contest? I am completely baffled why there is such interest in a bunch of repellent, gluttonous pigs cramming food down their gullets, like some kind of weird post-apocalyptic update of an ancient Roman food orgy. I can only hope that the participants come down with a terminal case of crapulence. Yes, there is such a word as "crapulence." It means "sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking." It's in the dictionary, check it out here. It's like the Word God made up a word as a gift for me. It's much classier than the more colloquial "craptacular." I plan on using words like "crapulent" and "flatulent" in conversation and correspondence as often as I can.

On the immigration front, we had someone named Barry Wong, who is a candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission, the governing body that controls utility rates, come up with a rather incredible idea of cutting off electrical power to illegal immigrants. This idea is breath-taking in its insanity and can probably make its own run for the most half-baked, ridiculous idea of the year. How this proposed law could implemented and enforced, Mr. Wong did not deign to explain, but in an area where the temperatures can reach 115 degrees or higher it this would be tantamount to murder. Also, you would have to know where all the illegal immigrants live before you can start cutting power, and most people here illegally go to a lot of trouble to keep that information from the authorities. I fail to see how the whole immigration debate is advanced by this kind of demented logic, but maybe it works as comic relief, in a pathetic kind of way.

Way to go, Cox Communications, for giving me a brand-new cable modem when my old one stopped working last Thursday night. Oh, I should point out that Cox decided they weren't going to support my old modem due to changes in their network, so when I called and complained about my high-speed internet service going away, they said it was my problem and I need to buy a new modem. They very graciously offered to sell me a new modem for the "discounted price of $39.99." I told them they can shove their discounted price up their discounted butts and started up the corporate ladder on Friday morning. After about an hour complaining they relented and delivered a shiny, brand-new Motorola modem to my house. So they get points for a good resolution but they also lose points because I had to force them to do the right thing. The lesson in all this, kids, is the squeaky wheel does indeed get the grease and don't give up when you know you're right. But it is kind of sad when you have to shame a big corporation into fixing a problem they themselves caused.

But hey, things are not that bad for me at all. I have a house full of happy rabbits and doves, lots of good friends, time to enjoy myself and get stuff done, and every reason to believe life will continue to be sweet and each day is to be savored and appreciated. I'm finding out that getting old kind of sucks, but with age comes a peace of mind and a level of contentment that just isn't possible when you are in your twenties or thirties. So I'm going to serve the bunnies their daily salad and think about the cooler days and nights which will surely come around again. In about 4 months.

Hell-On-Earth Weekend

Independence Day 2009 is tomorrow and I have named the weekend closest to the holiday as "Hell On Earth Weekend." Allow me a couple of minutes to ruminate about early July in central Arizona.

I have been living in Arizona for sixteen years now, soon to start my 17th year at the end of the month - I moved here July 31, 1993. In my first full day in my new apartment the high temperature was 113 degrees. I thought to myself, wow, they weren't kidding in the least about this desert heat. It was blazing hot even at 9am in the morning and by mid-afternoon, a somnambulant, claustrophobic veil of heat blanketed everything with its stifling intensity. Even the doves outside my bedroom gave it up and hightailed it to some shady bit of shelter. Not knowing any better, I took a short walk outside and quickly noticed there weren't a lot of other people walking around. As I looked up into the hazy, glassy sky and listened to the surreal buzzing of the cicadas in the palo verde trees, I felt that the heat is so overwhelming it seems even time stops in its tracks. I walked around my new-found home town and thought about how different this place was from my previous home, the San Francisco Bay Area, and from the small town in western Pennsylvania where I was born. I understood that my new home would have a lot of challenges and opportunities but I also knew it would never be boring.

Residents of this area have come to realize that the wonderful, mild weather we enjoy during most of the year comes with a price, and that price is summertime. Starting in mid- to late-May, when the temperature starts edging up to triple digits, and lasting through the vast wasteland of June, July, August and most of September, summer will come and sit on you like a Sumo wrestler with a bad attitude. It rules your life and determines when, where and if you will venture outside. Summer is vegging-out time for us Phoenicians; in other parts of the country, winter is when you stay inside the most because the weather outside is so harsh and outrageous. Here, we spend most of our time indoors during summer.

And it's not like we get a lot of breaks or respites from the searing heat. It took me quite a while to get used to the fact that many times, it can still be above 100 degrees at 10pm at night and surprisingly windy, too. Friends in other parts of the country sometimes ask me what it's like to experience that, and I always tell them the same thing: get a hair dryer, turn it on high, and point it directly at your face. That is EXACTLY how it feels outside, and I'm completely serious about that. There are summer nights when it does not even dip below 90 degrees at any point, and scientists tell us that in about 20 years the nighttime temperatures won't even get below 100 degrees. This is the so-called "heat island" effect, where the buildings and roads and asphalt parking lots of the ever-expanding Phoenix metro area (the 5th largest in the country) will retain and re-radiate so much heat at night it will keep the temps in triple-digits 24 hours a day.

The only breaks we do get from the heat are from the delightful meteorological freak-out called the monsoon, which is the distinguishing feature of summer in Phoenix. It is a seasonal shift in the direction of the prevailing winds which normally come from the west, but during the summer they swing around to come from the east and bring with them a lot of humidity and the possibility of violent thunderstorms and rain. It's quite an amazing process how monsoon storms happen. The blazing sun blasts the desert floor to the south of us with heat and immense, rising columns of water vapor form enormous mountains of moisture-laden clouds, which you can see piling up on southern horizon. As long as the sun is out its heat props up these huge thunderheads, but in the evening when the sun sets all of a sudden the energy is gone and these huge thunderstorms collapse in on themselves. The wind pushes out of the bottom of these clouds in what are called "outflow boundaries" and as they sweep across the desert floor sometimes create an amazing apparition called a "haboob" or a dust storm, It is quite majestic and startling when you see a gigantic orange cloud of dust hugging the surface and pushing up from the southeast. It can envelop the entire valley in minutes and reduce visibility to several dozen feet. These outflow boundaries also trigger the moist, unstable atmosphere to form thunderstorms.

Alternately, the monstrous thunderclouds can form above the Mogollon Rim northeast of the valley, powered by the same solar energy, but when that energy is removed the storms collapse and come roaring down the Rim into the valley like runaway freight trains, bringing sudden, very powerful thunderstorms. I used to think they were fun until last year when an incredibly violent, three-hour thunderstorm took out the ash tree in my back yard, which was nearly a hundred feet tall had been there over 40 years. The only good things the storms bring are some welcome rainfall and a much-too-temporary 20-degree drop in temperature, which we enjoy for as long as we can.

But along with the rainfall the monsoon season also treats us to some amazingly beautiful sunsets, and as the sky fills with dust and all different kinds of clouds at many different levels, the setting sun illuminates and transforms it into an astonishing tapestry of red, yellow, orange and magenta, framed by a royal blue background. Often you can see distant thunderstorms in stark detail low in the sky, laced with bolts of lightning, which will sporadically illuminate portions of the clouds in startlingly beautiful colors. These light shows in the clouds are my favorite aspects of the monsoon season, and they always leave me amazed at their power and beauty. The desert seems to be like that - it can be a very harsh, unforgiving environment, but the dangers and inconveniences it presents are usually offset by scenes of breathtaking beauty which never fail to excite the imagination with wonder, no matter how many times you see them.

So, Hell On Earth weekend is here again. Actually for me this is a marker in the long, hot, dusty slog that is summer in the desert. It's an indication that time is passing, and the cool temperatures of autumn, while still a long way off, are starting to come a little bit closer. The summer solstice was about two weeks ago, and in a little while you will start to notice that it's beginning to get dark in the evening a little bit earlier than it has been. As we continue the arduous, slow crawl toward Halloween - the date that long-time Phoenix residents regard as the true beginning of the cool weather - we realize there are going to be some uncomfortable times to get through. But get through them we will, and when the mornings start cooling off enough for me to take some bunnies outside for fresh air and I can start to open up the windows at night, I hope I will have the presence of mind to stop, look around, and enjoy this amazing desert wonderland I have chosen to make my home.