Summer Is Too Hot?

Coffee break
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I spotted a few people complaining about how the recent heat wave is a bit too hot for them. To put things into perspective, Yoopers Ole and Sven are here to remind everyone that it could be worse or better, depending on how you see things. Ole and Sven are to be read with Yogi Yorgesson’s thick Scandinavian accent. Or Charlie Berens’ thick accent when he is doing the Manitowoc Minute over on YouTube.

OLE and SVEN

Ole and Sven die in a snowmobiling accident, drunker than skunks, and go to Hell.

When they arrive, the Devil observes that they are really enjoying themselves.

He says to them 'Doesn’t the heat and smoke bother you?

Ole replies, ‘Vell, ya know, ve’re from nordern Meeshigan, da land of snow an ice, an ve’re yust happy fer da chance ta varm up a little bit, ya know.’

The devil decides that these two aren’t miserable enough and turns up the heat even more.

When he returns to the room of the two guys from Meeshigan, the devil finds them in light jackets and hats, grilling Walleye and drinking beer.

The devil is astonished and exclaims, ‘Everyone down here is in abject misery, and you two seem to be enjoying yourselves?’

Sven replies, ‘Vell, ya know, ve don’t git too much varm veather up dere in Meeshigan, so ve’ve yust got ta haff a fish fry vhen da veather’s dis nice.’

The devil is absolutely furious. He can hardly see straight. Finally he comes up with the answer. The two guys love the heat because they have been cold all their lives. The devil decides to turn all the heat off in Hell.

The next morning, the temperature is 60 below zero, icicles are hanging everywhere, and people are shivering so bad that they are unable to wail, moan or gnash their teeth.

The devil smiles and heads for the room with Ole and Sven. He gets there and finds them back in their parkas, chooks, and mittens. They are jumping up and down, cheering, yelling and screaming like mad men.

The devil is dumbfounded, ‘I don’t understand, when I turn up the heat you’re happy. Now it’s freezing cold and you’re still happy. What is wrong with you two?’

They both look at the devil in surprise and say, ‘Vell, don’t ya know, if hell iss froze over, dat must mean da Lions yust von da Super Bowl.’

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Where I lived in the desert, one day I was outside working, pulling weeds, mending fence, that sort of thing, and as afternoon waned and I head back to the house I’m thinkin’ “What a nice day!” Then I get back to the house and see this.

thermometer
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We’d peaked at 122F that day.

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You have me beat. On that day I had to get a load of cat litter from a warehouse in Phoenix 18 years ago it was only 102. I still have not figured out how the asphalt fails to liquify.

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Depends on the quality of the asphalt. There’s a road in Great Falls MT that was, shall we say, paved in haste, that used to burp bubbles in the summer heat. I’ve seen others that take tire tracks when they get hot enough.

Montana holds all the records for crazy temperature extremes. That why we understand Ole and Sven. :smiley:

https://montanakids.com/facts_and_figures/climate/Temperature_Extremes.htm

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I believe you. Last year I was in Montana. 35 and rain. The next day, 95 and wind. Wyoming is another one for huge temperature swings.

The reason I bring up asphalt is because when I was a teen on the farm in Wisconsin, the local town board got the bright idea of paving every gravel road that up until then, was good enough for the farmers. The neighbor’s empty hay bale wagon peeled up the asphalt less than a week after it was put down. The loaded wagon peeled up more in the opposite direction.

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You got off light. I’ve personally seen it drop from 80 to the high 20s in about two minutes (just outside of Bozeman MT) and out of the blue winds clocked at 84mph. And sunshine to hail before you can blink is common enough to draw no notice – extra fun when it lays down an inch of ice on the interstate in 30 seconds flat. I wasn’t going very fast and managed to ease to a stop (that ol’ dually is pretty good on ice), but several folks spun on past and wound up in the ditch.

Gallatin County (Bozeman surrounds) paved a lot of the rural gravel roads, main reason is there’s way less maintenance, especially with every winter’s constant freeze-thaw cycles that chew up high-traffic gravel roads (hard on paved too, but not as bad). But they’d been maintained and had a good roadbase under ‘em, and they didn’t cheap out on the asphalt either. Last I was around there, they were still in good shape even where they get a lot of farm and ranch traffic. Guessing your Wisconsin roads just got a thin layer and the base wasn’t prepped right, cuz it really shouldn’t peel up like that, especially under something as light as a hay wagon.

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I know I got off light in Montana. Especially after experiencing a Yellowstone trip not quite 30 years ago and having every kind of weather except for a tornado and a hurricane before lunch.

You are correct about those town roads where I grew up. A few towns over where my uncle lived, they could pave a road in 1966 and it was still good in 1986. Where I grew up, they went cheap on everything, believing they were saving money. Minimal gravel. What base? You could still see the cedar logs supporting the roads that went through the river’s flood plain and the swamp. The gravel was that thin. The asphalt didn’t peel up in the morning when the heavy milk truck was on the road because the sun wasn’t out long enough at 6:30 am to sufficiently warm it up. It wasn’t as if there was a gravel shortage to put down a good base. The local gravel pit provided enough to build every silo and building foundation plus provide material for paving the interstate across half of the county. My parents’ generation believed that they were saving money if they went cheap instead of doing it right the first time. Then do it over again next year. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I remember the adults in the room complaining when the interstate was constructed. “The road isn’t needed. Why is the state using so much concrete! 14 inches is too much! 4 will do! Why is all that gravel being wasted under the concrete! Nobody will drive on that!” Then they would always complain about how old 41 and 141 were always in a constant state of construction because the concrete that was put down in 1957 was constantly breaking up. “Those trucks are too big! They keep breaking up the roads!” Not realizing it was the frost going out in the spring combined with being built on either clay or mud with no base.

Here we are over 50 years later and the only things that have been done to that interstate were painting new lines and replacing the dual measurement road signs and mile posts (Next exit: 1 mile, 1-5/8 km). It was the 1970s, when the government dictated that everyone must use metric. And then went about implementing the conversion in the worst possible way.

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Yeah, I remember when the interstates were new and everyone was all agog at four lanes and shoulders on both sides and why is the roadbed thicker than the Earth’s crust? But most of ‘em are still in pretty good shape. Friend worked on ‘em back in the day, and says the super-straight stretches are 30” of concrete because they were meant to double as military runways.

During the 1994 Northridge Quake, the Antelope Valley Freeway (Hwy 14 in SoCal) which was built for heavy truck traffic, got pretty seriously compressed where it passes through the riverbed flats east of Santa Clarita – couple miles turned into regular waves around 4 feet tall, yet for the most part it never even cracked. At first that stretch was like driving a boat on the ocean, up and down and up and down… Caltrans never got around to trying to fix it, and over the next few years it flattened back out by itself, and ten years later you couldn’t even tell it had happened.

My little road out front was the original state highway through here, probably paved in the early 1940s, in the era of 8 foot lanes. It was retired … in the early 60s, maybe? and mostly neglected ever since. They patch holes when cars start falling in, but otherwise I don’t think it’s ever been so much as chip-sealed… and it’s just now starting to deteriorate around the edges, mostly from the garbage truck.

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