“Nine months of the year in Phoenix and Tucson are simply paradise.”
That is nonsense and you know it! You could say that about Flagstaff and the AZ “high country,” but I used to work for a company that had a plant in Casa Grande and that place is “Satan’s Oven” for more than three months out of the year. And don’t get me started about the summertime flash floods. It can be 1000 degrees and then you have a storm that’s like a cow pi$$ing on a flat rock, and all of a sudden every arroyo is disgorging water like a broken dam. And that action “upsets” the rattle snakes who don’t like to have to swim.
I'm in the valley but once it starts to cool off, we love it here. I gave my wife the chance to move back to South Florida but she wants us to stay here. We visited there again last summer and she cannot stand the humidity and loves the desert.
But yes, the transition months can be warm, and summer is miserable but we have come to call it home.