Hottest Day of the Year

That's what it felt like today.  It was officially 98 at the airport, but my car thermometer read 100 degrees when I left work at 4:30.  It may have been even hotter earlier than that.

I delayed my run until 7pm tonight.  It was still in the mid-90s at that point as I trudged around the track at the nearby middle school.  I started out in a tank top, but that soon came off.  I couldn't go much farther than the 3.75 miles I managed.  I walked home and took the coldest shower ever.  The previous record for that had been last Saturday.  Finally, the summer of my dreams has reached western New York.

It comes at a price though.  This has been fueled by the drought in the lower midwest.  The area is so dry, there is no moisture to cool the air flowing up from the southwest out of Mexico.  It's given rise to what meteorologists have been calling a "heat dome" that has slowly traveled across the country.  This must've been why temperatures were so much warmer in the 1930s as well.  I've seen so many heat records dating back to that decade, the time of the dust bowl.  We created a new heat record today.

What a far cry from summer of 2009.  I was positively bitter after that summer.  I felt cheated.  Two years later, I find humans and mother nature colluding to make up for it.  I'll be ready for winter this year, I know that much.