Summer in the Desert
I was thinking about other things that were particular to a Phoenician summer, and remembered two, one that is unfortunate and one that is amusing. First, the unfortunate:
I watched the local news daily, and always cringed when they covered the number of toddler deaths due to drowning in pools that were ungated, or unsupervised. It drove me nuts that every day during the summer months, at least two children a day died for lack of a simple fence or pair of eyes. I’d always lament to netfriends, “How many kids need to die before an owner of an in-the-ground pool learns to secure the damn thing?” Augh.
On a lighter note, also related to the news, I was amused by the choice of wording the meteorologists used to describe the weather in Phoenix, and how it differs from the vernacular of a less sunny climate, say, in Seattle. Where in Phoenix, all instances of half-sun and half-clouds would be described as partly to mostly cloudy, in Seattle it would be optimistically referred to as partly to mostly sunny. potato, potahto.
