Monday, April 17, 2006

An Early Scorcher

One hundred and one degrees--wow. That was the official high at DFW Airport today. Blew the doors off the old record, it did.

Thankfully, it didn't feel that hot, but I did notice that most of the schools where the practice rooms tend to be warm were definitely that way today. There were reports of the power going out all over Plano, including a whole bunch of traffic lights along the George Bush. It even hit the music store while I was teaching there; we went dark for about twenty minutes. There was talk of those "rolling blackouts" being to blame (which was confirmed here), and I'm sure that the demand for air conditioning was a big strain on the power grid. Still, it seems like there should be a way to exempt traffic signals from that procedure...

So if you're here in DFW, did you lose power where you were today? And if you're not, how hot (or not) did it get in your neck of the woods?

Another animal story: A cat travelled all the way from Saskatchewan to North Dakota by riding on the frame of a fertilizer truck.

Yet another one: The cat who had been trapped in a wall in New York City was finally rescued!

And one more: From Russia, it's the Pig Olympics. (I especially got a kick out of the swimming races.)

7 comments:

James said...

Twas a whopping 77 degrees down here in Sydney-town today :)

Hehe.

Eric Grubbs said...

No power outage for me. I was reporting the ones elsewhere though . . .

Kev said...

James--I was hoping you'd be one of the ones who would chime in, since you're in autumn and all that. Have you ever had an early spring day that hot?

Eric--I bet that was a chore. The Wolf-man sounded pretty busy yesterday afternoon when all that stuff was going on.

Anonymous said...

hey this is kristina, shawn's girlfriend that you met at outback. i saw the pig olympics on some channel, they had a diving competition, it was funny, it was mid 90s in our Kc neck of the woods. Shawn said that you really like baseball, so do i, so he said that we should talk about that. i guess that's all

James said...

38 degrees C is a mighty hot spring day, that's for sure. I don't think it's ever got that hot in Sept or Oct... well, not that I can remember. But that sort of temp in November (late spring) is certainly probable.

As for 101 degrees anytime around Christmas - ahhh yep, every second day :) The most memorable Christmas was 3 years ago - well over 110 degrees, and looking out the back all you could see on the horizon was thick smoke from bushfires to the north and south and out west.

Kev said...

James--that's still just so crazy to me. We've joked about your (imaginary, yet stereotypical) swimsuit-wearing Santa before, but I'm just trying to imagine Christmas without even the slightest hint of winter (even though I spent the bulk of my childhood in Houston, where Christmas was usually playing football {American kind, of course] in our shirtsleeves on a 65-degree day...although we did have a white Christmas in '04).

So do they even sing any of the secular Christmas songs at all down there? It seems like "Winter Wonderland" or "Sleigh Ride" would just be totally ridiculous on a 110-degree day.

James said...

Hehe - yeah, sadly Jingle Bells usually makes an appearence most Christmases in public school. However, those carols don't make an appearence at the Carols service that our church puts on - we just stick with the ones that sing about the actual reason for Christmas :)