For today:
I’ll always remember my first winter in Chicago, when one of the Chicago TV channels sent reporters out to interview the “man on the street” for their opinion.
TV reporter: “What do you think of this weather?”
Crusty old fart Chicagoan: “Is this a slow news day or somethin’? It’s December in Chicago, fer chrissakes.”
Yesterday was our first actual day of fall here in north Texas, oh yes it was. Temperatures in the low 60s, night time in the low 40s, and brisk, cold winds from the northwest… hell, I almost had to wear a light coat to the range, fer gosh sakes. (A gilet was all that was necessary.) From the forecast, it seems as though there’s no chance of any high temperatures popping up from now on, either. Yippee.
And all you guys in the northern states can quit your sniggering now. If ever I leave Texas — highly unlikely, absent a lottery win, and maybe not even then — it would be to escape the sweltering Texas summers, which are no damn joke (as much as we make jokes about them).
So the end of summer and the long-awaited fall — my favorite season, regardless of which state I’ve lived in — comes as a welcome relief.
In celebration of fall, my laptop’s wallpaper is this:
…although how I really feel is this:
Wouldn’t mind a little drizzle now and again, either.
Britishland’s Meteorological (“Met”) Office has outdone itself. Talking about the current spate of “heat waves” afflicting the Scepter’d Isle, this little bit of wisdom came out:
The Met Office blamed man-made climate change as Britain basked in the hottest day of the year. The mercury soared to 34.7C in central London on Tuesday, the highest anywhere in Britain in 2025 so far.
The Met Office said it was “virtually certain” that the searing temperatures were caused by global warming.
And the basis for this alarming statement?
But it admitted that it “had not conducted formal climate attribution studies into June 2025’s two heatwaves” before making the claim.
So you just went ahead and made it all up, didn’t you?
Dishonest bastards.
Yesterday saw our first of 90+ degree daytime highs. Ugh.
But for the benefit of the Global Cooling Climate Warming Change© crowd, when I looked this phenomenon up, I noted that May 12 was the latest day in the past 43 years that the 90+ temperature arrived. Not that it matters too much. If the forecast for this week is to be believed, daytime highs will seldom reach the mid-80s, and drop into the high 70s by the coming weekend. Sunday, in other words, was something of an anomaly.
Welcome to a typical Texas spring, in other words.
Still, there is one benefit to our searing summer highs:
Oh yeah, baby… Daisy Dukes and skimpy lil’ tops, gawd love ’em.
Fucking hell, it’s cold out there. In Texas.
From Reader Joe Donuts (probably a pseudonym):
“Your wallpaper got me pondering as do many of your posts about what used to be Great Britain. I spent most of my 20 plus years in Uncle Sam’s Traveling Air Circus stationed in East Anglia. Miss it terribly and shudder at what it, and the rest of Europe, has become.
“Fall left here last week. The snow has been on the ground since Monday and is here to stay until late April. I’ve woken to single digit temps the last day or two; they’ll have a negative sign soon enough. Call me odd, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Nor would I. Possibly the strangest thing is that as much as I wouldn’t live pretty much anywhere in the North that I used to (Chicago, New Jersey etc.), I do miss the seasons thereof.
I loved the spring: the way that one day it’s brown and ugly after the snow has melted, and a week later the trees are in full bloom and the grass has somehow recovered after being buried in snow for a few months and is now green again; the joy of a warm, occasionally-hot summer when it feels good to be outside and life just seems more worth living after the February-April dreariness; of the fall, where the trees change from uniform green into a kaleidoscope of many colors and the sweaty heat of summer is replaced with cooler temperatures; and finally, that first snowfall, the beauty of the white covering over everything and the incredible hush that falls after the snow has fallen…
I miss it all, terribly.
And yes, I know that raking the leaves is a pain in the ass, that shoveling snow every morning at 6am in sub-freezing temperatures can become tiresome, and that after the snow has more or less melted away in the late winter/early spring that everything looks dirty and ugly.
As the man said: “Show me paradise and I’ll buy us the tickets.”