Summer in Florida

It's hot. Really hot here in normally warm Florida. And the official start of summer isn't until June 21st. Everyone talks about Florida in the summer and how miserable it is. And guess what? Their right! Imagine walking into a giant oven that's preheated to 300 and that's bout the way it feels. Summertime in Florida means when you have something to do outside then you get up and you go out early, usually before ten to do whatever it is you have to do. Anytime much after that and you start running the risk of having heatstroke. 100 percent humidity insures that your clothing will be drenched with sweat in a few minutes. But we Floridians are a tough bunch when it comes to heat. It can be 110 out and we can't let on to fellow Floridians that we think it's hot. We always have to wait for whoever we are with to say it first, like it would be perceived as a weakness for us sun loving people. Put ten of us together and we can be outside and we can talk about sports, politics, whats going on around town and other topics of conversation and when the first person mentions something about how hot it is then we all chime in. Yeah, its pretty dang hot. We just can't be the first to say it. If there's a northerner in the bunch or around us we will NEVER admit it. Hot? This isn't even close to being hot! We still have ten or fifteen degrees to go before its hot! That northerner will have sweat pouring out of every pore on their body and literally be melting before our very eyes but we can't let on like its hot. I get a kick out of being at my job at Disney and you see these red faced guests panting and chugging along. When they ask "How do you stand this heat", we always answer with "what heat"? This is nothing. You should have been here last week. It was hot then. Yes, its mean but we delight in it. Why? Because we like to brag to all of those northern friends and family in the wintertime whens it 10 degrees and there's 2 feet of snow on the ground up there about how we are laying around in our shorts thinking about going and jumping in the pool. We always have to add during the conversation what OUR current temperature is and yes there is a almost a perverted joy we get when we do that. Northern friends post pictures taken outside their homes on Facebook after a big snowstorm and complain that the forecast is for another six to eight inches in the next 24 hours and then we comment with some kind of sentence designed to inflict even more despair and agony on them. Posts like "Wow, and I just got back from the beach". Or "Just finished cutting the grass and dumb me, I took off my shirt and now I have a bad sunburn". Or the real mean one of "And I was just thinking about turning on the A/C". We are a cruel bunch of people down here. But let me let you non Floridians in on a little secret. It gets hot here in the summer. Really hot. And we pay a big price for calling Florida home in the summertime. We are acclimated somewhat and we can probably take a little more heat then non Floridians but we get hot just like everyone else. And we do pay a price for living here in the summertime. When we are outside here in the summer we are always on the lookout for a shady spot to stand under or somewhere else to get out of the sun. If we don't we better have some sunscreen on cause we will get burnt! We get up and get out early to get our chores done and then we search out the A/C till the sun goes down. Darkness provides some relief but you dare not go outside in it or you'll be eaten alive by mosquitoes that look like their more in the horsefly family then the mosquito family. Six bites from these guys and you will get light headed from the loss of blood. Then there's the forest fires that always start up around mid May or so right as we wind down from our dry season. Every year somebody will toss out a cigarette butt and it will roll onto the dry, thirsty grass and ignite a patch of said grass and before you know it you have a 40,000 acre wildfire burning out of control. That fire starts other fires and the process just keeps repeating itself until half of the states woodlands and scrubs are burnt or burning. You can smell the smoke, sometime you see the smoke if there's one burning nearby, which there almost always is. A few weeks ago they had one burning right outside of Disney's property up by the Magic Kingdom and for a week solid the smoke would start rolling in and the guests would ask "Whats burning" and "Should we be concerned"? "No", we would answer. Just a raging, burning wildfire. And they all have the same distinct smokey smell. It's like nothing you've never smelled before but once you do there's no denying what it is. They all get extinguished here very shortly as we enter the rainy season. And calling it the rainy season is a mild way of putting it. When one hears "the rainy season" you would tend to think of a time of the year when it would rain off and on every few days or so. Steady, ground soaking rains that lasted throughout the season of rain. Right? Well friends that's far from it. Typical day here during the rainy season is like this. Sun comes up. By 9 am it's 80 degrees. Noontime it's 90. Humidity is at 100 percent. Suns blazing down, withering anything dumb enough to be out under it. Around 2ish the sky starts getting dark. Dark turns to ugly, scary looking black. Then the sky explodes as the upper air currents coming in from over the atlantic ocean and the gulf of mexico collide and if your outside you better seek shelter. All that humidity that's been building over the course of the day comes pouring out of the heavens in the form of raindrops so big and falling so fast that they actually hurt when their falling on you. Loud thunder rips and echos and the sky comes to life with some of the most amazing lightning bolts your ever seen. Witness one of these storms and you'll know why central Florida is called the lightning capital of the world. At night the weather forecasters will tell you about the days storms we have had and they actually count the number of lightning strikes per storm and the numbers are always in the thousands. A bad one averages 14,000 to 20,000 strikes per storm. I remember when I moved here in June of 2000, right before the start of the rainy season. When it did start I was completely blown away by the force and the intensity of these storms. I remember thinking to myself this isn't normal weather. At least not any I was used to. Once a few years back I got caught outside in one of these storms as I was going into work. I worked at the Magic Kingdom and we had to park a half mile or so it seemed from where we were to report. Anyway, I was almost there when a storm popped up and the winds and the rain and the thunder and lightning started. I had my umbrella because I knew by the storm clouds that it was coming, I was just hoping to beat it. I didn't. I opened my umbrella and tried to shield myself from the onslaught of rain but I was losing the battle. Suddenly, I felt the hairs on my neck and body stand off straight and I felt a funny feeling in the air. The next instant a lightning bolt struck somewhere very close by me and I literally felt the ground shake. I heard the electricity travel through my umbrella and I took off running, scared out of my mind. I ran and jumped onto one of the parked Disney buses and as soon as I got on there my umbrella just fell apart into pieces. The electrical surge had actually blew it apart. Thankfully it had a wooden handle and I saved that handle for a reminder of what had happened. From that day forward I gained a whole lot of respect for lightning and what it can do. But anyway. that's a typical rainy day here in Florida. It will blow, bang, beat, rain buckets and then after about thirty minutes its over. Usually the sun is back out soon after it stops and it's just as hot and then even more humid then before. So you see friends, yes we love to brag in the winter when we're here and your there. But make no mistake about it, we pay our price in the summertime.