i have the thermostats in my house at 82 degrees. Most places in Phoenix are freezing during the summer, It always feels so good stepping outside in 100 degrees after eating in a restaurant.
Even before this discussion I suspected that I was an outlier on the lack of heat tolerance side.
At least from the comments on here I think it is pretty clear that
@Riffraft is an outlier on the other side. Even at that, I doubt that he'd feel the same way if he wasn't retired and able to pay people to handle things like yardwork. I can't imagine that more than a trivial number of people would rather mow the lawn in 112 than 52. I've worked construction and there is NO WAY I'd want to do that in Arizona. There aren't a whole lot of people who actually consider 100 degrees comfortable.
Where I am today it is in the high 70's and, IMHO, uncomfortably hot. Now granted a lot of that depends on what you are doing/wearing. At lunch today I had to go home and have lunch with the youngest while my wife took the bigger kids to a splash pad for a foam party thing they were doing there:
- Even though it is only high 70's, when I got to my truck which was parked in the sun it felt like an oven getting in.
- I was uncomfortably hot all the way home before the open window and a/c finally got it down to reasonable.
- After lunch with the youngest, I took him to the splash pad to drop him off to my wife. High 70's is fine in a bathing suit or shorts and a t-shirt but I'm dressed for work in long pants and a long-sleeve button-down shirt and tie. It was uncomfortably hot carrying a toddler across the parking lot and sitting in the sun with him and the other kids while my wife ran to the van for some things.
I don't mean to say that high 70's is terrible. My point is more that this is getting to the high end of my heat tolerance for everyday activities. I go to work dressed professionally. Sometimes I have to wear a suit and tie. I HATE wearing a suit and tie in 75+ weather.
I think that certain areas of coastal California are basically a weather cheat code. The Ocean (or altitude if you get into the mountains near the coast) keeps the summers as cool or in some areas cooler than the Midwest and the latitude permits you to, as
@betarhoalphadelta said, throw away the scraper.
Outside of that unusual exception I really wouldn't want to live anywhere much hotter than where I am. Maybe somewhere RIGHT on the coast in Florida but even at that, only if I was retired.
When I was a kid we visited relatives in Tucson. They were very wealthy and retired and had a pool in their backyard. They had lived in Arizona for decades and despite that, contra
@Riffraft they couldn't handle the heat. It was funny, they literally slept twice a day specifically to avoid the heat. They never went outside until after sunset. So they'd go out on the patio by the pool after sunset and stay out until around midnight. Then they slept something like midnight-4am, then they were back on the patio before sunrise drinking coffee and reading the paper and once the sun came up and it became uncomfortably hot (even to them) they went back into the a/c. Then they'd take a siesta and get the other half of their sleep after lunch.
I thought, even then as a little kid, that this seemed great if you were retired and could afford it but for anyone else it would SUCK to live there.