July 31

A hotish day filled with the grey haze typically associated with sleep debt and jetlag. The only things cutting through the carbon monoxide were the amateur flashbulbs of sportsfans trying to freeze history in Dodgers stadium.

July 30

Almost home.

Guest writer Bethany T:

Dare I say, it's lovely? LA is out in her Sunday's best on a Monday. Lovely puffs of white clouds adorn her cerulean gown. Hollywood has turned its wind machines on low and the palm trees are flirting with the sky. Hurry home, LA clearly misses you.

July 30

Almost home.

Guest writer Bethany T:

Dare I say, it's lovely? LA is out in her Sunday's best on a Monday. Lovely puffs of white clouds adorn her cerulean gown. Hollywood has turned its wind machines on low and the palm trees are flirting with the sky. Hurry home, LA clearly misses you.

July 29

Guest Writer J.G. Francis

Dear 80 and Sunny,

Hungarian pigeons are hot tubbing in warm grocery store gutters.
Behind cafe window panes, frantic flies try desperately to Houdini
themselves free, their unsuccessful brethren writhing below. Bermuda
grass burns. Fallen oranges rot. It is a beautiful 83 degrees in Los
Angeles today, sunny, with a nice Northern breeze.

Tomorrow, your welcome home will most likely be the same.

Sincerely,
J.G.

And Kelly K writes:

Sweat beads on the back of my neck like the condensation on my beer glass. weather like this is an excuse to get drunk under the sun.

July 28

Guest Writer Kelly K:

80 and sunny. The palm trees are swaying in the breeze. Its what people back east imagine when they think of hollywood.

And Jamie Masters:

Hot. But perfect Saturday weather. Breeze is just cool enough to enjoy sticking your arm out the window while driving.

July 27

Guest writers!!

Bethfromabove

Today: hot oven. No clouds. No moisture. Even palm trees look dead.
Oh and a million tons of car exhaust with no place to go

Bethany:
today l.a. fucked with my emotions. for one reason or another, it teased me like a hot latin lover whispering promises of cool breezes and soft cloud covers. but no, like the days before and surely the days after, it started with a slow swaying of the hips and ended with the blasting of shiny brass trumpets. I'm feeling hot! hot! hot!

July 26

Guest Writer Jamie Super Momma M:
Sassy. Brazen. Daring me to lose my shit while driving around town with no A/C. Actually, the weather is downright bitchy today- the Jr Highschool variety (harmless but fucking obnoxious). So, for Thursday O7-26-O7. the weather in LA is like spending the day with a hot bitchy 8th grader.

July 25

At Seven-Eleven they have a glass showcase that displays meat wieners doing the lumberjack roll on metal logs. They call them Big Bites and Super Big Bites and they swell up and turn brownish red and roll, roll, roll all day long under the heat lamp. They bead up just a little bit with sweat, not enough to relieve the internal pressure, just enough to make them look extra-unattractive. There is no way for them to hide from onlookers or the heat and yet they continue to roll. The average seven-eleven patron doesn't know when the hot dog's shelf life is up. Neither do the Big Bites.

It was one hundred thousand degrees today. And that, the above hot-dogged description, is what it feels like.

July 24

Feast of St Christina the Astonishing

...she would jump into a burning furnace until she could no longer handle it, or into the river in the coldest weather and stay for weeks. Once she was even said to have gotten into a mill-race and been carried under the wheel. She would pray while balancing on a hurdle or curled up in a ball on the ground. In a church at a placed called Wellen, she climbed into the large font and sat in the water. Of course, many thought that she was insane.

*it was very, very hot today.

July 23

It happened while most of us were sleeping. Rain. I saw a bit of the temporary staining on my sidewalk early this morning but it was gone before I could look twice. Unbelievable. Who did the rain dance?

So by the afternoon everything went back to the prehistoric hotness of a proper Los Angeles summer Monday. Back to the way we were before we remembered rain. Usually we all crowd in together to wait to cross the street with our dry eyeballs and unmanageable B.O.

July 22

A surprise rainbow falling on dusk tonight. It was visible on the 110 near downtown. We haven’t seen rain since January so who knows where it came from. I counted forty tiny rain drops on my windshield. Lots of funky fast moving cloud patterns all day. Like the past two days, visibility was low. But today was special because of the moving clouds. By the time the rainbow showed up the sky was bubblicious and everything looked hypercolor. For a brief moment I even thought the Staples Center was green.

July 21

Hot like crossed buns today. Smoggy with a kind of ecstatic sadness that makes one think how there ain't no sunshine when he's gone. And by he I mean the mountain range I can't see.

July 20

(guest writer Bethany Toews) Today the walk up Elysian Park Avenue felt good, I'd say 81, possibly, 81.5 (but it's up a hill). The LA sklyline was wrapped in a light layer of gauze. The day ended with it's share of pink. I love LA. We Love it. The Dodgers lost. (No Randy Newman)

July 19

Mid-seventies with a mid-eighties heat index in the sun. Perfect day for sailing to Catalina. It was a day where even the pelicans looked bronzed and joyful. Waterfowl joy index: 73. Dolphins in glistening water visibility index: 90

July 18

That’s right. 80 and sunny today. The sun was so bright that it didn’t even go away when we closed our eyes. It was so clear and cutting that a mere human eyelid was nothing more than a meager gathering of atmospheric molecules to the sun. And we all know how much the sun respects the Ozone. This is the kind of sun we will call eyeballtanable.

July 17

The Goodyear blimp was spotted over Redondo Beach today. The blimp, known for it’s no-nonsense steel-grey color and yellow lettering, looked like a repaired swatch of a screen door up there. Fog, cloud, grey, haze, smog, screen, film, brume – call it 79 and partly cloudy. Partly cloudy in Los Angeles is not like partly cloudy in Kansas or Iowa. Partly cloudy means that part of the day is going to be cloudy, not part of the sky. There are no clouds for the sun to peek through once in a while throughout the day, there is only muck and then light in the afternoon. But the light almost always comes.

July 16

It started off dull grey today but there was no rest for air conditioners. By the afternoon the sun came back to remind us all where we really are, under her thumb. Baking in her 79 degree rays. Framed (or trapped) by palm trees and dirty buildings. Giving over our precious energy life force to UVA/UVB light.

The straightaway roads like Brand Blvd and First Street offer great views of the distinct tonality of our great sunny city. Heat from the grimy streets and sidewalks creates a grey tone around the high-rises and as you look up to the wide open sky there is a flawless gradation from white-grey to grey to grey-blue to blue. A perfect mirror of the morning to afternoon transition. Such is nature’s light on industry.

July 15

90s again. Gleaming robust Sunday church-going sunshine. The kind that makes rooftop antennas look like runway lights and the road in front of you look like water. I counted seven people on seven different street corners shielding their eyes from the sun even though they had sunglasses on. They’d rather walk in the sunshine than live in the shade. Amen.

July 14

Ripped off from party convo last night:

“You ever stick your head in a toaster oven to check if your pizza is done? That’s what it’s like outside.” “We are all cherry pop-tarts in a giant toaster.”

287400

July 13

Hot. 90 plus degrees. When it is this hot and muggy outside there is no difference between looking through your dirty dusty windshield and looking out your own eyeballs.

July 12

Almost 85 degrees today. I had the pleasure of driving around a guest from Oaklahoma City for most of the day. “Now THAT’S a blue sky,” he said. How many ways can you say a sky is blue? Blue is blue, right? We need a way to describe color presence in atmospheric (sky) terms.

I propose using a modified version of the 4 C’s for diamonds: Color, Crispy-ness, Clairty, and Cloud weight.

Today’s reading:

Color: Tweener of Cerulean and Dodger Blue.

Crispy-ness: High, polarized lenses necessary.

Clarity: #1SPV (sharp with Some Puffy clouds Visible).

Cloud weight: (judged in terms of cotton products with q-tips being very heavy, quilting filler/batting somewhere in the middle, and cotton balls being very light) today was about .25 cotton ball.

July 11

79 degrees and clear skies today. Bluer than billy’s ocean. From the window near a corner cubicle at the Glendale Public Library I developed the following technique:

The best way to judge how blue the sky really is, is to look for a nice leafy tree and find the edges of a top shelf leaf cluster (greener the better) and keep that point in mind. Don’t look at it too hard just yet, just know the spot to look at. Rub your hands together like Mister Miyagi in the karate kid until they get warm. Then cup your hands over your eyes and leave them there for fifteen or twenty seconds. Then take your hands away and look at the point you picked. Whoa. Clarity that will cut through your retina. Believe that.

July 10

It was in the high seventies most of the day. Not uncomfortably hot but there was a touch of humidity that made outdoor coffee consumption dangerous for the elderly and those wearing synthetic fabrics. The mostly cloudy part of the forecast was mostly accurate. The so called clouds presented as a grey haze. Mixed with the fog layer it was hard to distinguish where the clouds started and the carbon dioxide began. But the grey stuff broke into fluffy cumulus clusters just in time to let the sun blind rush hour motorists with long shadows and streaks of glaring light. A fine Tuesday in LA.

The Beginning

I was inspired to start a weather description project after a recent stint in my great homeland of the Midwest. In Michigan a day without talking about the weather is a day where your lazy ass probably didn’t get out of bed to interact with the rest of humanity.

People in Los Angeles are not all of the bad things the world thinks but they are indeed, weather dumb. Imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have to scrape ice off your windshield or wait for your car to warm up or suffer alone sitting parked under a highway overpass to wait out a deadly hail storm or crouched in a basement to avoid getting torn away from your newborn baby or German Shepard by a tornado? Weather isn’t a concern here and I feel my descriptive abilities are suffering because of it.

So the purpose of 80 and Sunny is to give a daily description of the weather in the land of little rain. Hopefully it will inspire people to appreciate the god given sunshine. Hopefully it will give the public the tools and techniques needed to differentiate the hundred kinds of sun we experience. Hopefully I will become a better writer.

The project will last one year starting tomorrow on my birthday. I’m just one of those people that enjoys giving more than receiving (lie).

Forecast for Los Angeles tomorrow? Go figure, 76 and mostly cloudy.