Viva Las Vegas

I've been hearing on the news and on the internet that Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in America right now. I can imagine that the real estate market out there is having a huge boom. Honestly, I don't know if I'd ever want to live in Las Vegas. I mean, it's in the middle of the freakin' desert. Too hot. It gets really hot here in Arkansas and even with the oppressive humidity we have here, the heat doesn't hold a candle to the triple digit numbers Las Vegas hits in the summer. I can imagine that, if I were to live there, I would spend a fortune just for air conditioning. God forbid there was a power outage. Ever.

Still, I don't know about y'all, but whenever I've thought of Las Vegas, I've not thought of people actually living there. Logically, though, I know they must because of the enormous number of casinos. I'm sure there is more to Las Vegas than casinos, but that's the first thing that comes to my mind. I'm sure there are some nice residential areas there, though. I haven't seen much in the way of designs of houses out there, but from what I have seen, they seem to be built mainly of light-colored brick. I suppose that's a good thing, since the light color would reflect the sunlight, keeping the house cooler. I don't think there are many trees out there. (Another reason I couldn't live there. I adore trees. Old ones. The ones whose trunks you couldn't even begin to get your arms around.)I hope that they are making them entirely out of brick and not just putting up one layer of it over the basic structure of the house (that's how mine is) because if not, the brick would be of little value it seems to me. Bricks tend to stay cool, if they are not directly facing the sun, so if there were several layers of bricks on a house, even though the outer ones would absorb the heat, the inner ones would stay cool; thereby reducing the overall cooling bill.

I don't know the first thing about house-building, though, so all of what I'm saying might be totally ridiculous. I suppose if one had the superman-of-all-insulation installed in one's house, then it wouldn't really matter what it was made of. Again, though, I don't know.

There are people who love to live in the desert. There is a certain calm-but-dangerous beauty about it. I've seen pictures of some beautiful flowers that grow only in the desert. Also, there are great mountain ranges close to Las Vegas and ,of course, the Hoover Dam is out that way. So, I guess it wouldn't be so bad living there. Just not my first choice. I'm weird like that, I prefer the old over the new. My dream house would probably be at least 100 years old. As I sit here typing this out, I am smacked in the face with the reality of my hypocrisy. I live in a subdivision that is only about 8-10 years old. My house is only 5 years old. There are no trees in my subdivision and it's really hot in Arkansas. It seems as though the world prefers the new over the old, ergo the population boom in Las Vegas. It seems like everything out there is shiny and new.

And hot.


EDIT:I was thinking about what I said about the whole building houses with bricks thing to keep the inside cool and then I thought about some of the restaurants I've been to that have "brick fired ovens" and the fact that I saw a show the other day about an old prison that had what they called a "hotbox" that they put prisoners in for solitary confinement punishment. Some of them got roasted alive in there because the heat would get up to 120 degrees Farenheit. It was made of brick.

I think I was thinking stone instead of brick.