Jul 24 2006
Heat Wave Weekend
It was a good weekend in the Valley, despite the brutal, record-setting heat wave that has engulfed SoCal. Saturday, we spent the afternoon with friends JT and Phoebe, celebrating the one-month birthday of their son, Jacob (Cub to his friends) with lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. We returned home to discover that Van Nuys had been hit with a rolling blackout, and our power was cut off for three hours during the hottest part of the day.
That night, we went to see the Dodgers play the Cardinals. It was 90 degrees at game time (7:10 PM), and it had reached a high of 110 degrees during the day in Chavez Ravine. We sat right behind home plate with Jake, Aiyana, Mark and Faleena, sweating profusely as the Cardinals (much to my Reds-loving chagrin) built a 6-1 lead on Albert Pujol’s 32nd homerun of the season. Over Dodger Dogs, garlic fries and, fittingly, Perrier, we celebrated 8 consecutive years of American dominance in Le Tour De France as Floyd Landis brought home the maillot jaune earlier that day in Paris. That’s eight in a row, and 11 of the last 21. Lemond – 3, Armstrong – 7, and Landis -1. While Floyd’s story will never equal the comeback from cancer that was Armstrong’s miraculous saga, consider that Landis was riding on a hip that is so injured it must be completely replaced in the off-season. Also consider that his turnaround from losing eight minutes to gaining back all but thirty seconds of that deficit in 24 hours may be the single greatest performance in the history of the Tour. So, we toasted Floyd, I jeered Jeff Weaver (he still won), then we bolted for some AC after the 7th inning stretch.
Sunday was Tina’s birthday, and she wanted to get soaked at a water park, so the same crew that sweated together through the Dodger loss rolled up to San Dimas early in the morning to spend the day at Raging Waters. It had been 112 degrees there the day before, but we got lucky as it was cloudy most of the morning — there were even two pauses in park activity due to lightning and rain showers (unheard of in July here) — making the experience quite comfortable. We rented a cabana, rode slides (Tina and the Kid were limited to category 1 & 2 attractions), played in the wave pool, chilled in the lazy river, and paid way too much for food and water. It was a fun day, though, a happy birthday for my bride, and a busy, busy weekend despite the heat, which, according to Climatologist Bill Patzert of the Jet Propulsion Lab, is here to stay for a long while.