Crystal-clear and really, really warm this Saturday afternoon on California’s north coast, and with a temperature right now of 74-degrees, this is the ultimate in summer — yet with summer still a couple of weeks away.

So warm, I worked a couple of hours in my little back patio/yard area — cleared some weeks, dug-up some roots and generally just cleaned months of collected neglect. And a worked-up a fairly good sweat, which is way-unusual for me.

According to our own Lost Coast Outpost, this weekend is a record setter as there’s some real-hot temperatures east and south of my little playpen. Although it’s a nice-feeling, sea-coast-breezy 74 here, just a few minutes east and the temp goes up 10 degrees, and then another few minutes  another 10 degrees, and by the time you get to Weaverville, you’re boiling at 103 — about an hour or so away.

(Illustration: George Brehm‘s 1924 ad for ‘Palm Beach Suits‘ found here).

And the middle of the state is a blast furnace — Red Bluff at an amazing 114-degress, Sacramento at 108, and Fresno at 111. There’s a Red Flag warning for northern-middle California right now with very-hot temperatures and a goodly wind. Excellent forest-fire ingredients.
Meanwhile, further east in the infamous Oklahoma weather-disaster region there’s a severe storm watch with golfball-size hail expected and winds up to 70 miles-an-hour this afternoon, and out on the east coast, the impact of Tropical Storm Andrea is off the books:

In some places, rainfall measurements smashed century-old totals as flash flooding occurred.
Central Park saw 4.16 inches of rain, more than double the record set in 1918.
No major damage was reported.
Philadelphia International Airport measured 3.5 inches of rain, compared to the 1.79-inch mark set in 1904.
In Newark, N.J., 3.71 inches of rain broke a 1931 measurement of 1.11 inches.

Life in the nowadays is whip-shod in so many different ways.
And to help, Wonkette on Friday posted a nifty-look guide of weather/natural-disaster shit spawning upon the land, and with the overall climate heating up, precaution is forewarned: While it’s not correct to link specific storms to Anthropogenic Climate Change, it has been established that increasing global temperatures make the incidence of severe weather more likely and the storms more dangerous. The answer is probably not “Let’s just do nothing.”

But…