How’s the weather?

Let’s talk about temperatures. 

It’s mid-July. If you live in the northern hemisphere, that means that it’s summer. Summer means that it’s hot. Hot...well. Hot can mean a lot of things. Hot and humid. Hot and dry. Hot for the location. Hot for the time of year. Hot for one person can be perfectly temperate for another. 

I grew up in Gilroy, California. We regularly got into triple digits in the summers. If the marine layer didn’t make it over the Santa Cruz mountains at night, we were very toasty indeed the next day. And if it didn’t make it over the mountains for multiple days in a row, we roasted. Ours was a dry heat. To me, dry triple digit days aren’t anything out of the ordinary. Are they comfortable? No. But do I go around bemoaning them? No. Because I’m used to that version of hot.

The east coast of the U.S. has this thing called humidity. Their hot is a wet hot. It’s awful, and I hate it. I spent six weeks at a ballet summer school in upstate New York in 2003, and all I can say about that is thank god for air conditioning. Any time we vacationed as a family in an eastern or southern state, I spent a great deal of time wanting to expire. Humidity and I are not friends. Give me my dry heat any day, thank you very much.

The further one gets from the equator, the further one is from the sun--regardless of the season. Even in their respective summers when they're tilted toward the sun, the northern and southern extremes of the planet are still farther away from it than the midsection. This means that the average temperature at the higher latitudes is lower than those closer to 0°. Basic fourth grade science, amirite? So it follows that persons living in the higher latitudes have a lower tolerance for heat. As a trade-off they’re better at being cold, so everything sort of evens out in the end, but it does rather leave half the population uncomfortable for half the year. People who live at the middle latitudes probably have the best idea, all things considered. Physics dictates they shouldn’t tip too far one direction or the other, temperature wise.

Of course, the weather doesn’t always operate in a way that makes any sense whatsoever--physics be damned.

I lived in England for two years. Now there are some people who are not suited to the concept of ‘hot’. It seems that they’re experiencing a spate of hot weather the likes of which they rarely, if ever, see, and--bless them--they’re not coping too terribly well. I saw something recently that said they were up to 104°F, but for whatever reason the publication in question was asserting that for the UK, this was the equivalent of Austin, Texas, at 129°F. I'm assuming that they're trying to factor in humidity or something. 

 

And that leads us to something which, quite frankly, baffles me. "Feels like" temperatures. 58° is 58°. If it "feels like" 62°, then it ought to be 62°.

 

Don't even get me started on wind chill factors...

 

Any old way, I hope y'all are keeping cool wherever you are. Or warm, if you're in the half of the world where it's winter right now. Temperate. I hope you're existing at a temperature comfortable to yourself. Sure, that works. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to see if I can open the blinds and make my house feel more like a house than a cave-that-helps-keep-the-place-at-a-reasonable-temperature...