autumnal equinox

It's that day which counts as the legal end of summer.

I know it's been much worse in other places, and ghu forbid I should be taken as denying global warming, but around here, this summer was not as hot as the last three summers.

For a couple of years now, I've been tracking local weather forecasts in a spreadsheet, mostly to keep tabs on impending heat waves. So I have documentation. This is daily forecasts, not weather reports (which I've been tracking much less long), but it gives an idea. If I define a heat wave as "above 90 F" which is about when I start feeling really uncomfortable, there were 21 days this year which passed that, and only one above 100 F, and they were all in July and August.

Last year there were 30, and they ran from early June to late September, with 4 above 100 F, and one brutal shot with 9 above-90s in a row.

The year before that, there were not so many above 100, but 40 above 90, and they ran from late May to early October.

The year before that I don't have figures for, but that was the year I went out one evening and got myself an air-conditioned hotel room for the night. On September 7. It was over 100 F. September 7 this year was 84 F, it hadn't been over 90 for over a week, and that only for one day.

I haven't felt it necessary to do that again since. Especially with B. having developed the practice of turning fans on in the upstairs rooms in the late afternoon when the temperature starts to go down, and not waiting for evening. It makes the nights fairly tolerable.

Meanwhile there have been large forest fires in the more isolated parts of the northwest corner of the state, generating smoke which has interfered with the outdoor shows at OSF, and is now drifting down here. But the first big storm of the season is arriving, and while it shouldn't hit us very much, it should drench the fire zone.