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##San Francisco Weather – Commentary Lesson

Hi, this is Kristin. Welcome back to the commentary for the conversation San Francisco Weather. It’s very interesting to be doing this conversation right now because just two weeks ago we had an extreme heat wave. Remember, heat wave was in the conversation. It means unusually hot weather, hot temperatures. We had a heat wave here in San Francisco about two weeks ago.

In parts of the city, not the whole city because remember there’s microclimates here, so there’s different temperatures in different parts of the city, so in some parts of the city it got to be, it got up to be 106 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 41 degrees Celsius. That had never happened before, I’m pretty certain that was the first time that this had happened here in San Francisco. It’s very unusual.

And then one week ago, well so let me say, after that, for one day it got up to be as high as 106, the next day it was more than 100 degrees, not as high as 106 but more than 100 degrees. After those two days, the temperature dropped a bit but it was still very humid here, humid meaning there was moisture in the air, still making it feel very warm. And again, that’s unusual for San Francisco because it’s usually cooler weather.

So that was all two weeks ago and then one week ago we had a day where, again, in parts of the city, in parts of San Francisco, it reached more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the scale so that would be 37.8 degrees Celsius. Now you may remember in the conversation, me mentioning how I’ve seen the weather changing a bit since I’ve moved here, having more and more warmer days. And he denied it. He didn’t agree with me. He said I haven’t noticed that.

Now it was actually, this was several years ago, I was speaking to a woman who was born and raised in this area, not necessarily San Francisco, but in a town near here. And she was telling me how she has seen the weather getting warmer and warmer and how it’s very unusual to see that here because we’re so used to the fog coming in and cooling things down. Because we have that natural air conditioner, the fog, many apartments, if none at all, have air conditioning.

So those days that I mentioned where it was 106 and then more than 100 degrees, many people were suffering because we’re not, first of all, we’re not used to that kind of heat, those kind of temperatures here in the city, and we don’t have air conditioning.

So Joe and I live in a building with three floors and on the third floor is one woman who lives with her cat and because she’s up higher, she’s on the third floor, and, y’know, heat rises, her apartment was…it had to have been hotter than 106. It was really, really hot inside her apartment. Again, she had no air conditioning.

She had a little fan but it really wasn’t helping any. She had to bring her cat down to our apartment, mine and Joe’s, we’re on the ground floor and our apartment was still hot but it was much better for her cat to be here. He was panting, which is not a good sign for an animal when they’re doing that. It can be a sign of stress. It can be a sign that they are dehydrated, y’know, they need water. So he stayed here with us for two nights.

And it was so interesting at that time, too, I just…Joe and I both, neither one of us had any energy to do anything. We were just kind of laying around. I actually had to go in to work to another job that I have and I remember thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to go. I have no energy.” And I can remember going to work thinking how hot it was and looking around outside.

Usually, there’s a lot of people walking around in San Francisco. You didn’t really see many people out walking those really hot days. And, in fact, I heard of some people even talking about going to see movies, because usually in a movie theater there is air conditioning. It’s one place where you can go where you can get cooled off or even be cold.

I can remember when I lived in Thailand, I got so used to the heat. We didn’t have air conditioning and it was so hot there in Thailand and I got used to it though. But when we would go to see a movie, I would be so cold because the air conditioning, I just wasn’t used to it. So anyway, people here were talking about going to movies just to sit in the air conditioning.

Our friend, Wat, that we mentioned in the conversation, he said…like I said, he’s 4-1/2 hours north of San Francisco where he lives. He said it was 115 degrees Fahrenheit up there. That’s 46 degrees Celsius.

And his wife, Wan, was pregnant, very pregnant, like about to have the baby any day and that just must have been so uncomfortable for her.

There was even, I remember going by an ice cream shop and I was thinking, wow, it’s strange, I’m surprised I’m not seeing a line out the door for people wanting to go in and get ice cream. And the closer I got to it, I realized, it was closed. So I looked it up on the internet and I was like, oh, this is strange. Did this place shut down permanently?

What had happened was it was so hot here that the…I think it was their refrigeration and their…not refrigeration, their ice, freezer, their freezer was…the actual freezer was having problems dealing with such hot temperatures, it shut down. They were having problems then keeping their ice cream frozen.

So they posted online, y’know, it just doesn’t work. It’s not good to serve people soft, soupy ice cream, y’know, the consistency of soup of some liquid. People don’t want that. They want hard, y’know, firm, cold ice cream. So they decided to close their store until the heat wave, until the temperatures dropped a little bit.

Okay, so that makes me wonder. Have you seen the weather change where you live? And if so, are you living in the same place where you were born and raised? Are you still living in that same place, that same area? And if so, has the weather changed? Have you seen the weather change over the years?

Share with us on the social site. I’d be interested in hearing about that.

Alright, I hope you have a good month and I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.