As an unusually warm air system settles over the western US this week, Lake Havasu City (and everywhere else) will head for the highest temperatures we have seen since last summer. It looks like this coming Saturday, June 4th will be the hottest day with temperatures around 115 degrees F. Let’s be clear; that’s HOT. But it’s really not all that bad assuming you have a strategy to cope with the heat. I moved to Lake Havasu City from Portland, Oregon in the spring of 2014. Portland on average has about 14 days per summer over 90 degrees. That’s a far cry from Lake Havasu City. Our typical daily highs in the summer months are around 106 to 108 degrees. When I talk to old friends and/or clients still in Portland, you can almost hear them fainting away on the other end of the phone when they learn how hot it is here. There are two key things that make this daily heat bearable. First, the heat peaks somewhere between 3:00PM and 5:00PM every day. The morning high temperature starts out in the mid-80s and steadily climbs as the day progresses. So we simply “front end load” our days doing errands and whatever tasks we need to do outside in the cooler mornings before the temperatures really take off. Secondly, what really saves us is the extremely low humidity that comes with these higher temperatures. I am writing this in the mid-afternoon near the peak high temperature. It is currently 109 degrees outside with only 5% humidity. We don’t have a heat index here. What you see is what you get. I talked with a client in Kentucky a few days ago where the high temperature was 95 degrees with 90% humidity. Which place do you think has the more comfortable heat? The last point is this higher heat typically turns on sometime in June and shuts off around middle–to-late September each summer season – 14 to 16 weeks long. That leaves us with 36 to 38 weeks of amazing temperate weather the rest of the year. That seems like a good deal to me. And for the next few months I’m hanging out in my swimming pool after work to beat the heat.