Summer Safety for Outdoor Cats: What the Season Brings That You Need to Know
Cats Want to Be Outside in Summer. The Season Has Other Ideas. Cats and summer seem made for each other — the warm pavement, the long evenings, the abundance of birds and insects that make outdoor life endlessly interesting. Indoor-outdoor cats that have been making supervised or free-range outdoor trips all spring become increasingly insistent […]
Keeping Summer Heat Out: How to Weatherproof Your Home Against the Season
The Best Cooling Strategy Starts Before Heat Gets Inside The cooling systems prep piece published in late April covered the mechanical side of summer comfort — AC tune-ups, ceiling fan direction, whole-house fans, and window sealing. That piece addressed how to remove heat from your home once it’s inside. This piece addresses the other side […]
The North American Monsoon: How the Desert Southwest Gets Its Summer Storms
The Desert That Becomes a Thunderstorm Factory Ask most Americans where monsoons occur and they’ll say India, Southeast Asia, or Africa — the dramatic seasonal rainfall systems that define tropical climates and fill reservoirs that entire populations depend on. What most don’t know is that North America has its own monsoon — a well-defined, seasonally […]
The Rapid City Flood of 1972: A Night That Redefined Flash Flood Warning
Fifty-Three Years Ago Tonight On the evening of June 9, 1972, a cluster of thunderstorms stalled over the eastern Black Hills of South Dakota and proceeded to drop an extraordinary amount of rain — up to 15 inches in six hours in some locations — over the steep terrain above Rapid City. The water that […]
The Heat Wave of 1980: When Modern America Lost More Than 1,700 People to Heat
The Summer That Proved Warning Systems Weren’t Enough By 1980, the United States had a functioning weather warning infrastructure that 1936 lacked entirely. Doppler radar was in development. Television and radio carried weather information to virtually every household. The National Weather Service issued heat advisories and warnings. Air conditioning was available in the majority of […]
Summer Weather and Mental Health: The Season Isn’t Uniformly Good for Everyone
Not Everyone Thrives in Summer The cultural narrative around summer mental health is almost entirely positive. Longer days, more sunlight, outdoor activity, vacations — summer is supposed to be the season when people feel their best, and for many people it is. But a significant minority experience summer as a time of increased psychological difficulty, […]
The Summer Solstice Explained: What Actually Happens on the Longest Day
The Longest Day Is Two Weeks Away. Here’s What That Really Means. Around June 21, the Northern Hemisphere reaches the moment of maximum tilt toward the sun — the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the astronomical beginning of summer. It’s a date most people know and few people understand in any […]
Fast Weeknight Grilling: Dinner in 20 Minutes Without Heating the Kitchen
The Best Reason to Own a Grill Is a Friday in June The Memorial Day cookout is an event. The weeknight summer dinner is a different thing entirely — something that needs to happen by 6:30, requires minimal cleanup, and ideally keeps the kitchen cool while the house is still warm from the afternoon. The […]
Why Summer Wrecks Kids’ Sleep—and What Actually Helps
The Season That Fights Bedtime on Every Front Summer attacks children’s sleep from multiple directions simultaneously. The days are long — sunrise before 6 a.m. and sunset after 8:30 p.m. at the summer solstice in most of the country. Bedrooms that were dark and cool in winter are now bright and warm well into the […]
How Drought Develops—and Why It’s So Hard to End
The Slow Disaster That Sneaks Up on You Drought is the weather disaster that arrives without announcement. There is no warning siren, no radar signature, no single moment when the threat becomes undeniable. It accumulates quietly over weeks and months — a deficit of rainfall here, a stretch of above-normal temperatures there — until one […]