The advantage of living where the weather gets harsh, Phoenix, Arizona


I live Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, which is in the Sonoran Desert. Most of the year the weather is glorious. It never snows here, the sun shines just about every day. I think the Chamber of Commerce says 360 days a year, but it may be only 359 days. People come from all over the world to visit the resorts here, and to play golf. But for three to four months of the year, it's insanely hot.

And surprisingly, that's an advantage to people like me. I've lived where the weather is nice all of the time, like Southern California, and have seen some very serious drawbacks. Of course, if you've only lived in wealthy neighborhoods, this won't matter, but I've lived in some, uh, sketchy, places. And while my house in the suburbs is pretty respectable, I'm certainly not one of the "rich folks".

Harsh conditions means that a fair amount of upkeep is needed on your house just to keep it comfortable. In Southern California, you can have everything from broken windows to great big cracks in your wall, and it really won't make all that much difference. Especially in Santa Barbara, where I lived for a couple of years. And where the weather is always nice, you don't need air conditioning, or heat, in your car or house. Except when you do, and you don't have it. I have been the most miserable in my life when the Santa Anna winds drove up the temperature of my un-air-conditioned apartment in Santa Barbara. And did I mention how difficult is is for someone like me to sleep when it's cold? Yep, no heat in that apartment, either. And the gas wall heater that I had in my place in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles might just as well have been nothing but sound effects. It just went "bang-bang!" and didn't really warm up the place. I left it off and slept under an electric blanket. Getting out of that bed on cold mornings was excruciatingly painful.

Here in Phoenix I have a 5-ton air-conditioning unit on the roof of my house. I have double-insulated windows. I am outrageously comfortable. My car was made by the nice people at General Motors, and the air conditioning is fantastic. I have expensive shades on my windows. I have a nice garage, where I park my car. Even the doggy door is double-insulated. And I can do all of these things without appearing eccentric. In Southern California, this level of investment in comfort would seem absolutely ridiculous for a modest house like this. Here, it's a necessity.

I'm glad I'm here.

 Image above: Walking through the cactus garden at the Glendale Main Library, 59th Avenue and Brown (just south of Peoria).

If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more