oh what a beautiful morning... and evening
The nicest times of day here are morning and evening. The air is cool and calm, and the calm and cool lets the smell of the flowers come through the strongest, and they sure smell nice. There are a bunch of kinds around, but so far as I can tell the type that scents the air so wonderfully is a sort of ground cover with small white blossoms. The middle of the day can be nice too, but it gets awful hot in the sun, and the wind gets up every day; while that makes things sometimes fun and interesting, it isn't the same sort of pleasant.
The other thing you see in the morning is folks watering their plants, which I guess is needed if you want to keep all those flowers in bloom. But I was just noticing this morning, man do they water. You forget you're in a desert to see the emerald lawns everybody keeps up between the street and their sidewalk, and the hedges and flowering shrubs blossoming hither and yon; but all of this topiary is reliant on water pumped in from, oh, thousands of miles away. And they spray it out like it's nothing: at least now, in the spring, I see people watering far more vigerously and unconcernedly than I ever noticed back in Massachusetts. Of course, it also doesn't rain here, so that may be a factor... but still.
That's not to say, though, that it isn't nice to walk down the sidewalk between a freshly watered lawn and a dripping wet flowering hedge, morning or evening; and since I'm leaving soon and won't have to be around for the water shortages and droughts I don't mind a bit.