Very uncomfortable weather

Today is a hot, humid day, the worst so far this summer.  Some thunder storms may roll in later.  Hmm, the actually humidity is 70% and the temperature 91 F, so the heat index is 109, swell. You can look up a chart to figure the index out. The kitty girls are used to lounging in north window sills, but under these conditions the windows will stay closed.  TPP got caught up on lawn mowing this morning when it was somewhat cooler. The crab grass is trying to take over the world along with a number of other summer weeds. This is when mulching earlier in the year will pay off. 
Our house handles the heat fairly well, but it has limitations. When the night time temperature drops into the low 70s or upper 60s, the house will stay comfortable without AC. But under these conditions the low tonight will probably be in the upper 70s.  The house is massive, white, and well-shaded for much of the day. It has good flow through ventilation and a lot of rooms have ceiling fans.  An evaluation for solar power came out as are you kidding?  So the economics may not work out so well for us although the shading is nice. Our electrical usage is below average anyways. 
TPP must venture out again soon because even though it's hot out there several plants may need water especially those in pots or planters, or those that are just newly planted period.  

Hot, humid summer field work

Humidty on our prairie study site was about 300% (based on how it felt) this morning especially down in the vegetation where we had little seedling plots to photograph.  The emergent vegetation, e.g., compass plant, is already about 6 feet tall and getting ready to flower.  The grasses will wait until later to shoot upward for flowering.  Quite different from the stunted growth of last year's heat and drought.  This area has had rain for the past few days so the plants can transpire a lot, and that makes the humity down in the vegetation as high as it can get.  And as the morning wore on, the heat rose, and you just became soaked in sweat.  Now the only complaint here is that when you're trying to see things, bending over, you keep getting sweat on the lens of your glasses, and that's really annoying.  The other problem is the prairie vegetation has lots of rough edges, and wearing short sleeves for comfort, your arms get quite scratched from pawing through the leaves searching for your well marked plots that nonetheless are hard to find.  It's not just sedges that have edges.  In compensation it's a nice meadow of flowers this time of year, fleabane asters, yarrow, wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium, shown with beetle floral

visitor), cone flowers purple and pale, pinks, black-eyed susans, sunflowers, lead plant.  Tomorrow morning will be a repeat.

New Record - 85 degree shift

Mrs. Phactor set a new record on Friday. At 5:30 AM when she departed it was -5 degrees F (-20.5 C) and by noon she was in southern Florida at 80 F (26.6 C), an 85 degree temperature shift in a matter of hours. But although not as drastic, the return from tropical to arctic is always much harder, and that comes from having returned from tropical field work into our winter on several occasions. No fun it that what so ever, however the worst aspect is not the temperature shift but the difference in humidity and the horrible things that does to my aging dermis.