I think that’s a desert kid thing.
Seasonally, we get combo Sahara Desert sandstorms with sea squalls and mud drops along the coast. We had double windows (like for cold weather) just to keep out the crap and dust.
Mom would makes us strip in what-you-would-call a mud room before coming in the house and put our clothes just in the dryer (to blow out the dust).
We didn’t have a mud room and would come home with PILES of sand in our shoes. Had to stand outside while mom watched to make sure we poured out our shoes and knocked them against the wall before coming in. LOL
We also had these bad boys.
What are those? I thought burr bushes were bad in the midwest. Those things could puncture car tires.
Those my brother are what we called “goatheads” also known as puncture vine and what most of you have heard of as “horny goat weed” Tribulus terrestris
In second place is this: Texas Sandbur
I have enough of both in my yard to disable the entire world.
Or cause a population spurt, depending on how you use it…
I suppose.
Story time 
My half sister was 11 years older than me. She was tiny, cute, and mean. She liked to run around the house barefooted. When I got big enough and she would be mean, I would pick her up and carry her outside and leave her in a grass burr patch until she apologized… 
Mountains?
Actually, more in the prairies.
When does Israel get the Sahara carryover? I had an internship at a law office in Jerusalem the summer after my 2L year, and the weather was strikingly similar to Albuquerque - hot, dry, mid-90’s temps- albeit with more humidity.
Having double-dust windows and a backyard dirt room is a brilliant idea. Where I live, we’re blasted daily by a western wind carrying desert sand, and double windows along the back of the house would be a game changer.
Having grown up in the Midwest where it’s nice and cold I didn’t even know single pane windows were a thing until I moved further south.
Now that I live in Florida I would love hurricane rated windows but they are insanely expensive (can stop a 2x4 thrown with 150 mph wind)
You just missed it – or came in the middle – it’s the book ends of summer – end of “spring” (we pretty much go from winter to summer – but there is about 2-3 weeks in there) and then start of fall.
They’re called “hamsin”. If you get an east wind/fall, we often end up with some pretty good wild fires, since our rains are generally winter.
Hamsin coming (I think Libya):
And you guys thought the scene from the “Mummy” with the mummy-dust-cloud chasing a plane was a myth!
What about those metal roll down shutters? Are they affordable?
I little bit better than than the windows but they are unsightly on the side of the house and some HOAs don’t allow them. I do like those. Cheapest bet is the corrugated steel “shutters” that you screw into permanent fasteners mounted in the siding every time a hurricane is on it’s way.
I have lexan and glass windows for security and theft reasons (like 1/4 inch lexan sandwiched between two glass panels). They are not as much as one thinks – but I put them in when I built the house, being a former petty thief as a kid. (I’ve actually considered a thread about real home security, but never gotten around to it.)
You can get almost the same protection as a true Lexan window with a 3M film you put in the inside of a window and then secure with structural silicone. It’s cheap and turns a 2-second break in into a 15 minute process – and would stop things like flying debris from a storm.
If you wrote a book I’d buy it. We bought my mother in laws house and it’s 75% windows and I hate it. It’s pretty much indefensible.
Yep, i split the hamsin goalposts, arriving in May and leaving just before August.
One of my roommates from the internship summer made Aliyah around six months later. He’s from NYC and noted the super-short spring.
Those hamsin are incredible; they even top the giant dust storms we get here. As a teenager, I helped build and worked at some local baseball fields. The fields are in the desert (here called a ‘mesa’, which refers to a flat, elevated landmass and also to the semi-arid terrain on its top.) During the spring, whenever the wind picked up, we ballfield employees would look for a brown cloud moving towards us and run for cover
Not a few times, I was caught in the open and left with no choice but to turn my back, squat as low as possible, put my arms over my face, and wait for the wall of driven dirt to consume and coat me.
Have you ever been caught in a hamsin?
Sure. They happen a fair amount. (“Hamsin” is Arabic for 50 – meaning they happen about 50 days out of 365.)
They’re just bad dust storms. I grew up on the beach (a town called Gush Katif, that doesn’t really exist anymore) and we’d get weird combo fog/dust hamsin coming over the ocean with Arabian desert dust (which is not exactly the same as Sahara dust for dust connoisseurs).
Generally they would occur within two hours of washing a vehicle.
You won’t need to buy anything. I’ll just make a thread here. Give me some time.
I like the snow for hiking and snowboarding. Otherwise, I only like it HOT. Give me 85 every day.
