Back from a race weekend in Iowa. It's WAY too hot to be going to a place like Iowa right now - of the four days I was there, I think the lowest daytime temperature was around 90 degrees. Ugh. I'm not one of those people who handles hot weather well. I'd rather be surrounded by snow 10 months out of the year than go through 3-4 really hot months of summer.

Boulder is hot, damn hot, in the summer. There have been summers since I have lived here that have been almost unbearable for me. In fact, in 2001 I fled Boulder and returned to Santa Monica, in part because I was so hot all the fracking time. I get cranky, have headaches, my joints swell - it's awful!

This summer got hot pretty early, but it's cooling off a bit now. We had a fierce thunderstorm last night, just dumped rain down on us. My house backs up to open space, and there is a creek just beyond our property line. Flash floods are not uncommon when it rains like that - it's one reason that flood insurance is required where we live. In the four years we've been in our house, we haven't had any flooding yet, but we are on the "100 Year Flood Plain" - let's just hope the 1-in-100 doesn't happen while we live there.