Still Life with Robin: It's 99.5 and That's Normal These Days

 by Peggy Robin

The heat is back, baby. Last week was a nice but brief respite from the spate of 100+F degree-days but now it's back to the 90s (speaking of Fahrenheit now, not of decades). 

Here's the temperature reading from the outdoor/indoor thermometer on my front porch, taken yesterday August 2 2024.

Now look at the reading a couple of weeks before (July 16, 2024):

That same day my friend Joan posted a reading taken at 3:57pm on Capitol Hill:

I suppose her reading was a few degrees higher because Capitol Hill has more pavement and less tree cover than leafy Cleveland Park. Or maybe it's just that my outdoor/indoor thermometer hangs on a wooden post facing inward on my covered front porch.

A note about the Radio Shack thermometer in the photo above: We got it sometimes back in the late '80s or maybe early '90s at the Radio Shack that used to be somewhere in the middle of the Cleveland Park commercial strip, on the east side. Maybe to the side of the CVS (which was then Peoples Drugstore)? Possibly it was next door to the Nation's Bank, now Bank of America(?) I tried to google it but it was so long ago that nothing came up. Anyway, believe me when I tell you it was the place to go for any kind of high-tech thing you might need -- cables and wires, and the big thing of the day, the cordless phone that charged in a wired base. They also sold fancy, multi-line push-button phones. And accessories for some of the early cell phones. 

And yes, this handy-dandy then-state-of-the-art battery-powered, wirelsss transmitting thermometer. Still works great despite coming from the digital Stone Age.

Are these images making you feel hot, even though you're reading this in your comfortably air-conditioned room? Take a look at this lovely YouTube clip to help you feel refreshed, like a cool shower: https://www.youtube.com/live/d1YoGAxmZtE (with thanks to a Friend of the Listserv for sending it my way).

Want to see something even cooler? How about this 2019 shot from Capital Weather Gang photographer Kevin Ambrose (who, if I ever found up the energy to organize a fan club, would be the object of my fan-girlism), who captioned it "a cool shot from Jan 13, 2019"

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Still Life with Robin is published on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.