California Or Alabama?

Wife kitteh and I have two recurring disagreements.

Wife kitteh wants a pool. Our lot isn't designed for a pool, so adding one would be very difficult.

I want to move to the South. Wife kitteh doesn't want to live in the heat and humidity.

I've argued that if we lived in or around Fairhope, AL, we'd have plenty of land (and money!) for a pool. We'd also have green instead of brown. I find San Diego depressing after about June 1. Everything is dead and dried for months on end. I think that's why we have all those wildfires, but I'm told I hate SCIENCE, so who knows.

Today, I went to NOAA's excellent climate data site and got results for Fairhope and Miramar NAS. Here are the results, using daily maximums only.

You'll have to click on it to read the labels.

I've been complaining lately that we've had bayou weather without the bayou. That is, San Diego has been hot and humid, but still dry and dead. Why stay here if we're going to get Dixie weather anyway?

Well, to be perfectly honest, the big difference is consistency. Yes, San Diego has some brutal days, ones that are worse than the Gulf Coast. What Bama has is consistency. Come May, you're facing hot, humid weather without a break until October. There's one particular two-week stretch you can see in the data, right at the end of June, where San Diego had lovely days with highs around 75. Fairhope was in the mid-80s the whole time.

In late August, there was a gap in the data, so I don't trust that stretch, but it's still illustrative.

It might have been more useful to plot the delta between the two lines, but I've lost interest in this project. We're not going to move no matter what now. One of our sons and his wife bought a house and grandchildren are on the horizon. Even the Marines couldn't get wife kitteh out of San Diego now.

Sigh, y'all.