I had Vegas style desert more in my mind. Cold at night and cool in the shade any time. I have spent time in Dallas/Ft Worth. Hot and humid like no where else in the Summer. Now El Paso doesn’t sound bad.

How does the High plains desert sound?

I highly recommend anyone visiting Mobile take the time to visit the Alabama, it is not only a fascinating machine in its own right, it is a historical monument, a survivor of the largest class of warships ever built (I don’t consider bird farms men-of-war, The planes do the fighting).

The world will never see the likes of them again. Aircraft made them obsolete.

The battleship is the 20th century equivalent, and final evolutionary development of the 18th century ship of the line, like HMS Victory, the last of her breed at HM Dockyard at Portsmouth, UK.

John Ruskin, in 1851, wrote about ships of the line
after they had already been started to be replaced by steam ironclads. But the sentiment still holds:

For one thing this century will in after ages be considered to have done in a superb manner and one thing I think only. . . it will always be said of us, with unabated reverence,`They built ships of the Line.’ Take it all in all, a ship of the Line is the most honorable thing that man as a gregarious animal has ever produced. By himself, unhelped, he can do better things than ships of the line; he can make poems and pictures, and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a being living in flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and mutual agreement, what is necessary for him in those flocks to get or produce the ship of the line is his first work. Into that he has put as much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly wrought handwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgement of God, as can well be put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 broad. And I am thankful to have lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.

HMS Victory- Nelson’s Flagship at Trafalgar, 1815.

Mobile typically has a rainy season in the spring and early summer, followed by the 10 minute convectives in July and August. These afternoon storms that linger on are something new.

You can see them starting to build up around noon, 8 mile high anvil- topped clouds, and right about the time you are getting ready to drive home from work, a rain of Biblical proportions, but only for a few minutes, so the statewide drought doesn’t seem to get any better.

And then, the sun comes out and the asphalt steams like the plains of hell. The ground is bone dry by the time it gets dark.

Damn, I miss Northern California.