The weather outside is frightful

What Jar said.

It's 61 F here, expected to reach 68 by this afternoon. Perfect.

So the high here today in Central Texas was a balmy 92 degrees which by Texas standards is pleasant. France on the other hand must be feeling like they are in Hell.
Paris recorded it's hottest temperature ever.I can not imagine what Paris must smell like right now. Edited by 1.61803, : No reason given.Edited by 1.61803, : better map

Strange we walk on the same planet as Shakespeare and I've heard he lived in a world that was 10 degrees cooler than our world.I am finally embracing Summer. You've heard of seasonal depression. Well I get super depressed every summer, like clockwork. This is the only year where I broke out of that depression before August. I told myself I was going to find a way to love and embrace Summer this year.By late September who knows, I might be resentful about having to wear layers again. Although it doesn't get really cold until November now, sometimes later.

I was in Texas last week and part of the week before and the heat and humidity felt like hell. The dragonfly hunting was great though and I got photos of the female of a species that I have long wanted to see and photograph.

A good many years ago, when I was 23, I worked in Paris for 6 months. One of the Metro stations en route from Charles de Gaulle to the flat I was in was Chatelet. It was clearly built in extremely close proximity to the sewers.Even with your eyes closed, you always knew when you'd pulled into Chatelet.It must be unbearable now.

That sounds extreme. I'm guessing you mean fahrenheit, but that would be about 6 degrees celsius. The worse case scenarios for global warming over the next century are only 3-4 degrees over 20th century averages.The below graph is from Wikipedia, and shows estimates from different studies. The most extreme estimate would be about 1.5 degrees warmer than Shakespeare's day.

Hi Tanypterx,
For the past 3 days the temps have broken low records in the low 60's,( at night.)
We had a "cool" front come in, I hate saying cool front when the high still gets in the 90's. But last year this time we had 22 days of over 100 degrees and only one day of 100 degrees this year. The humidity is oppressive since we are over 9 inches in our rain totals. My garden is actually producing tomatoes and peppers this year.
And yes I have lots and lots of Dragons flying this summer. In fact they are happy the resident Purple Martins have left as of last week back to South America. The Martins are usually gone by the second week of July. I will see if I can identify what dragon flies are prevalent here. Happy hunting.Edited by 1.61803, : spelling

Things a little different down here. So far we have had over 30 days at 100 or higher.

We've had a perfect summer here: 70s and 80s (Fahrenheit) during the day, down to 50s at night. We had one warm night and one so cold I had to close my windows. Rain every night and sun every day; the farmers have never seen it so good. Probably frost before the end of August.

Photos? Where?

Sorry, I haven't processed them yet.We collected eggs from a number of species and I am spending all my time shooting stacks documenting the embryo development. I set up my computer to automate a sequence of processing steps overnight, but right now I am generating more images per day than I can get processed per day. I have to record events as they happen and there is no chance for a do over.

Excuses, excuses.Ok, good excuses, good excuses.

Yeah, I know.The eggs I'm working with are from the species Neurocordulia xanthosoma, which is fairly rare across its range. It only flies at dusk and dawn. A group of us rented an Air B&B house on the Colorado River about .5 hour drive from Austin. We managed to net several ovipositing females and induce them into laying eggs for us. The egg clusters were embedded in an extremely sticky gel that was unexpected and it makes them a real pain to try and manipulate into the orientations we want to shoot. As far as we know, no one has ever collected eggs from this species, or reared them out. Each egg is about .3 mm long.

We had a rare lightning storm the other morning & a house in my neighborhood was struck & caught fire.We've had to clear our property line twice, so far, for fire protection. But our insurance company dropped our fire coverage anyway cuz we were just designated as living in a wildfire zone. Had to get a separate policy from a different company, of course more $$$.