My memory of here is that the place was hot and humid, and it is. Perhaps my ten-year-old sense of reality had not experienced enough data points to make a sound declaration. Ewa Beach was hot. Kailua was not.
It’s calm outside and the state of mind I find myself in is more tolerant of the heat; Hawaii is never really hot. Texas is much hotter. And unlike Phoenix or Las Vegas, it’s not a dry heat. And no year gives respite. There is no such thing as “the year without a summer” as there was in New England. Every summer in Texas is hot. Every Spring you have by then forgotten just how hot 21 days over 100 degrees is. And then you get weird anomalies, like pins pushing through the cardboard protection of seasons. I’ve sweat my days through three digits in January, and one digit in April. I watched incredulously as the National Weather Service in Fort Worth issued a winter storm warning when it was 86 degrees outside, then watched it drop to below twenty before the sun was fully gone.
I love watching the weather. I prefer inclement weather. Weather is a convenient and easy metaphor. But that’s not why I like it. Here’s a stretch. I love the weather for the same reason I love baseball. Everything can be measured, everything is measured, and every measurement is subject to immediate recall with the correct resources and effort; every measurement, even at the quantum level, matters.
I can tell you records in both, and you won’t care, but they exist independently of you or me. Esoteric and beautiful, they act as a beautiful gateway to codifying understanding.