Give it a couple of months to simmer
It’s the middle of July which, on paper, should mean it’s hot outside, but it’s not horribly so. Ha, ha, chortles your basic idiot climate denier — what happened to your global warming?
Oh, that’s here, too. Don’t let our current mild July lull you into a summertime reverie of idling in a hammock drinking lemonade and falling asleep to the drone of a distant gas-powered lawn mower.
As anyone who grew up going to a non-air-conditioned school in Long Beach knows, summer here doesn’t put on its game face until school starts in September.
When summer starts in late June, it comes in on little cat feet, bringing its vaunted gloom over the coast and giving summer a slow, sluggish start.
July, August, yeah it’s summer so you get some hot days in the 80s and maybe the odd one in the 90s.
September is where the action is, and if you’re lamenting the current sub-sizzling days, you’ll wish they were back when September kicks in. September and even October is when hot weather can forestall the onset of crisp autumn days.
The hottest days in Long Beach’s recorded history came in both September and October — not July and August, where your smart money would be.
Temps of 111 degrees charred the city on Sept. 9, 2010, tying the mark first set on Oct. 15, 1961.
The October 1961 temperature in Long Beach was the highest in the country, while the September 2010 mark lagged behind other cities, including Los Angeles, which set that city’s record with a temp of 113 — and maybe hotter had the heat not broken the thermometer at City Hall. Nearby Woodland Hills hit 119.
The year 2010 became the hottest year on Earth, but that’s since been surpassed by the latter part of the era: All 10 years from 2014 through 2023 have been among the hottest on the planet, and it’s a sure bet that 2024 will be the hottest year in history.
So I’m going to enjoy this mild summer before things go all to hell again, and be thankful that, for all its problems, I live in Long Beach where the Pacific generally keeps things relatively tolerable.
International Breakfast Tour 2024
My daughter and I stayed with the links this week — and we’re talking golf links, not sausage ones, though I had a bit of those too.
A couple of weeks ago we had a sub-par (in the bad way, not the golf way) breakfast at the restaurant at Heartwell Park Golf Course. This week, we got back on the circuit and tried the restaurant at El Dorado Park Golf Course, 2400 Studebaker Road. Comparing the food between the two courses’ restaurants is like comparing the courses themselves. Eldo’s is a championship-length course compared to Heartwell’s 3-par pitch and putt course. Hannah went with her typical bacon and eggs while I opted for the Mexican scramble, a mishmash of chorizo, sausage, eggs, potatoes and cheese.
I’d give Eldo’s (not to be confused with the Eldo Restaurant a few blocks to the north on Spring Street and Studebaker) breakfast a solid B, which puts it in the top half of the restaurants we’ve visited so far.
What I’m reading now
“Wolf at the Table,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Adam Rapp, starts fairly companionably with a look at an American family — Ava and Donald Larkin and their five children (six, counting a son who dies as an infant). Still, there’s something not quite right about Alec, the sole living son, and while the sisters’ lives are disparate and generally difficult in their own ways, it’s the boy who turns out to be the blackest of sheep — the titular wolf at the table — running dangerously afoul of serial boy-killer John Wayne Gacy before emulating Gacy’s horrors.
It starts as a sort of Anne Tyler family saga before everything goes horribly wrong. It’s an intense and captivating read for those who can handle it.