Sometimes a weather person's best friend is the thesaurus. If you have a stretch of days when things just don't change much, it helps to have a variety of adjectives from which to choose. Like right now. We've had 90 plus temperatures since Saturday. That means having to talking about heat each day. Of course, this is not even close to record-setting heat. You need to be up around the 110 mark to do that this time of the year. Still, by most definitions, when you have three or more days above 90, it can be called a heat wave. For someone in my line of work, and I use the word "work" very loosely, that means trying to freshen up the forecast when it's really getting stale.

Enter the son of a Swiss preacher named Peter Mark Roget. Really, every weather person out there should send some greenbacks to Mr. Roget's estate or give him an on-screen "thank you" or at least a FirstNews coffee mug and Bryan Busby Weather Calendar for all the help his much-used book provides when the weather is stuck in neutral. It gives a talking head so many options. Instead of just hot, it lets us say baking, blistering, boiling, broiling, burning, fiery, heated, red-hot, scalding, scorching, sizzling, sultry, sweltering, torrid, feverish and pyretic. Now, I've used most of those...I especially seem to like sizzling, scorching and sultry...but I've never ventured into "pyretic." Another word for hot, listed in the thesaurus, a word which, itself, always sounded like a well-read dinosaur to me, is "ardent." That has more to do with passion and romance than weather, I suppose. It's the kind of forecast phrase Fabio would use if he was a weatherman: "The weather will be ardent today as I pull your quivering soul close to mine despite the sultry feeling in the air. What's a little sweat between lovers. Our romance is more torrid than even Mother Nature can imagine. Then, as you swelter in my arms I will whisper to you 'I can't believe it's not butter' which you will mis-hear as 'I can't believe it's not better' and, deeply hurt, leave me to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous heat indices all alone. Back to you, Bill."

In addition to the heat, there's the humidity. Back to the book: muggy, sticky, steamy, cloggy, gluey, gooey, clammy, gummy, tacky, mucky, soggy and damp...or should that be dampy?

Sometimes you use phrases...the more hackneyed the better, in my case. "Hot as a firecracker." "Toga weather!" "Like a sauna out there." "You could fry an egg on the sidewalk!" "Hotsy-Totsy." That one is really a misnomer since the phrase "hotsy-totsy" means something great or special. At least it did back when Barney Google and Snuffy Smith first used it in the funny papers. How about "It was so hot today I saw a robin requesting his worm with ice" or "It was so hot my weather computer melted so I'm going home" or "It was so hot the trees were calling the dogs" or, as we used to say in Wisconsin, "It was so hot the cows were giving evaporated milk." If you have any you would like to share, just e-mail them to me at jnichols@hearst.com. I'd love to steal...I mean...hear them. I'll give you credit unless the phrase is really a great one, in which case I'll just pretend I thought of it. (If a person has a sudden bit of inspiration about such a phrase, would that be called a "hot flash?")

Of course, in this day and age, the word "hot" can also mean good-looking. It has morphed into the word "hottie." I thought someone called me that one time at the grocery store. "Look, it's that weather guy. He's a little hottie!" Turns out the person said "Look, it's that weather guy. He's a little dotty." I looked it up. Dotty means, among other things, feeble, mentally unbalanced, ridiculous and daft. Then, I had to look up "daft."

All in all, this balmy blog has been a hot-time filled with plenty of hot air. I don't want to be a hot-head or appear hot-blooded, but I have to hot-foot it out of this hot-bed of weather wackiness, jump in my hot-rod like a hot-shot, and head home. Put on my summer time hot-pants (sorry for the visual image) crank up the hot-plate for some hot cakes and hot dogs and, then, settle into the neighbor's hot-tub. (I have to be out before they get home and catch me or I'll be back in the hot-seat before the Homes Association...again.)

Maybe I'll just lean on the words of wisdom from my father. He used to say "When it's over 90, it's hot, period. Just say hot. Oh, and get your bike out of the driveway, pick up your room and take the dog for a walk. NOW!" Just like the old days: he's hot under the collar and I'm in hot water.