Obama Birthday & Arizona Monsoons

Tomorrow is our 56th anniversary. And I noticed in the paper that today is Barack Obama’s 55th birthday. So, our president was born exactly 364 days after Rosalie and I got married. I guess that will make it easy to remember his birthday. Maybe I should send him a card. Nah, too late this year, but maybe next year when he’s finally gotten the Oval Office off his back. Fifty-five years old and just look at what the last eight years have done to his hair. I don’t know what his plans for the future are, but I’m sure it will be something involving charity, and he’ll have a lot of years to devote to it. In ten years, he may even get a less biased assessment of his presidency, and it won’t be anything like what the GOP is now trying to say about it. I’m convinced that history will one day place him in the top ten, maybe even the top five. We’ll see.

Arizona is still in the middle of its annual monsoon season. For those non-Arizonans who might be reading this, the monsoon season usually begins in early or mid-July and usually lasts until early or mid-September. It’s a time when the temps can be anything from 90 to 115, but the humidity is way higher than it is in non-monsoon months, from 40% to something in the 60% range. And for us who have become acclimated to really low humidity, the monsoon season can be drippy hot. It’s also marked by cloudy skies and thunder storms, even one or two haboobs. Haboobs are those really ominous dust storms that look like mile-high brown walls rumbling across the Valley,

bringing automobiles and planes to a halt, depositing tons of Arizona desert sand in pools and roads and yards. Back to the cloudy skies: huge billowing clouds build up, looking like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Often they’re white, but often they’re also dangerously black, with rain cells taking turns zipping across the Valley and into the mountains to the north, with lightning strikes setting our northern forests ablaze. The monsoon season is our Arizona equivalent of the winter months up north when one fights the white stuff and the frigid air. Here, at least, the only thing one has to shovel is a bit of the haboob sand in the driveway. Sometime in September, we’ll notice a rapid drop in the humidity along with the drop back into temperatures in the eighties and nineties, and we’ll all heave a sigh of relief. Ah, back into the good stuff.