Not quite as hot today as yesterday, but still very hot for this region. 97 F at our place in the Oakland Hills, maybe higher; I didn’t check all afternoon.
San Francisco Chronicle, 5/6 Sep 2022: California heat wave: Bay Area records its highest-ever temperature
The power went out in our immediate neighborhood about 7:20pm last night, and stayed out until 1:15am this morning.
We live in the a three-story house where the main floor, the middle floor, ironically, gets the warmest. That’s because the top floor, where the bedrooms are, has air conditioning. The lower floors do not, but the bottom floor with the garage and two bedrooms (libraries) with windows blocked by blinds, stays cool. (But the rooms are crowded with books, and the cats litter boxes are in the bathroom down there, so there’s no pleasant place to sit.)
Last night when the power went out we went up to the master bedroom with a decorator lamp, battery powered, that was sufficient to light an area around the bed so that I could read for a couple hours. I read four Philip K. Dick stories. Service pickup trucks, red and white lights flashing, drove up and down the streets, so I gather the outage cause was some equipment failure, maybe a transformer, and not a planned rolling power outage.
Today it has seemed nearly as hot. We went for a short walk at 9am, but it was already in the mid-80s and I would just as soon have not. I worked at my computer a while the rest of the morning, as I always do, but by afternoon it was time to retreat to the upstairs bedroom, as we did yesterday to stream a movie. Today I read the entire novella/short novel Outnumbering the Dead by Frederik Pohl, the next novella my Facebook reading group is covering. (Taking notes by hand, rather than at the computer; I’ll write them up on the computer tomorrow morning.) Now I’m back down at the computer, my nearby thermometer still registering 92 here inside the house, sweat dripping down my back underneath my shirt. Outside, it seems (via iPhone Weather) that the temps have been dropping since early afternoon, so that we won’t reach the peaks of yesterday.
I have things to do on my computer, including compiling more awards given out last weekend at Worldcon, but that will have to wait another day or two until it gets more comfortable to sit at the computer.
The cats lie sprawled across the floor, eating little.
