Jeez. Ninety degrees in the shade, overcast, and raining.
Well. Sprinkling: more like threatening rain.
But the overall effect is Hotter’n The Hubs of Hades.
This is the way Arabia was most of the summer. Here, we only get a few days of it. There, we got three months of it.
How my father and his colleagues were able to work outdoors down on those docks escapes me. What a HORRIBLE way to make a living!
He subjected himself to it because he figured that between the more-than-decent pay and the fact that ARAMCO covered the cost of housing and transportation, he’d be able to retire about 10 years early.
And he did. Unfortunately, not bein’ the most sophisticated guy on the planet, he didn’t understand about inflation. So after he had “retired” (so he thought) and moved to Sun City, he had to go back to work. Ugh!
At least he was shipping out of Long Beach, not piloting tankers around Ras Tanura’s sauna-like harbor.
We didn’t have real air-conditioning out there. The company provided a kind of makeshift evaporative cooling: They pumped cold water through underground pipes that traversed the camp and came up into each home, where a whole-house blower would blast air over the relatively cool pipes and then into the house. This would work well if you were close to where the water came in to the housing tract. We, however, were not. 😀
Wouldncha know, eh?
My mother, who grew up in upstate New York and then later in Berkeley, California, suffered vocally in the heat. Me, I knew nothing any different, so most of the time it didn’t bother me.
But there on the shore of the Persian Gulf, the air was SOOO HUMID that it could rain out of a clear blue sky. You’d wake up in the morning — especially in the summers — to see water dripping off the eaves as though it had rained during the night. No…it had not rained.
We have no fake rain here this morning…but still. The air is thick.
Took Ruby for her morning perambulation around the park. What a zoo that place is when everybody and their little brother are out there tromping around — most of them walking dogs. It really is a nuisance to have to make your way around a dog every ten yards. I swear.
Often literally swear. The idiots who simper “ohhhh don’t worry! They just want to plaaaayyyy” are the ones that drive me craziest. That was a favorite line when they would bounce up to the German shepherd. Nooo, dear Moron. My dog doesn’t want to playyy with your dog. She wants to rip your dog’s throat out.
Anyhow, this place is alarmingly like Ras Tanura this morning — weather-wise. Wunderground predicts a high of 106 today. Humidity is 54%. Chance of rain: 12%.
Garden spot…