I hate trite, feel good, cheery catch phrases.
I don’t know how well this translates into English, but the one I hate most heatedly is: “There isn’t any bad weather, there are just bad clothes.”
Wow. Thanks. You know, I was really planning on running outside today wearing nothing but shorts and birkenstocks, but now that you mention it, I realize it’s winter. Thanks for pointing that out. I will wear four layers of protective clothing and pretend it’s summer.
I’ll be 43 this year. I spent three years in the south of Spain, so that gives me 40 awful winters. I know what winter is like. I’ve seen enough of them to last me a lifetime and more. I don’t need another winter to appreciate the summer. If there were a drastic climate change and we had 75F all year, with mild breezes, sunny days and light showers at around 4 a.m. every night, I’d be so happy.
Life is easier when you only need a pair of flip-flops, a pair of cut-offs and a T to make it through the day. I don’t want to roast in the sun. I don’t need a tan. I’ll be happy to stay in the shade.
But I don’t like to feel the cold coming through every layer of protective clothing that I have. I don’t want to spend 80% of my awake time indoors, because it fucking hurts to be outside.
And winter looks good on postcards. Nice white snow on rooftops, decorating spruces and making a general merry Jingle Bells panorama for Coke comercials.
In reality it’s sludge, slippery, wet, freezing, cold and generally just fucking up every day life.
What did my ancestors do wrong, to get deported here*?
Over here (northern NJ, USA) it’s +2 degrees F, which I think translates to somewhere around -16 C, with winds out of the northwest @ 17mph (plus 30 kph?).
I believe the description for this is “fuckin’ freezin’”.
May I simply say, fuck you very much. (Been golfing there a few times, btw. Once, had to drive the ball over an alligator who was sunning himself no more than maybe 30 feet away from me. Very odd.)
Actually where I live if there were not any seasons I wouldn’t appreciate winter. Its 68 degrees outside and I wore a TV all day outside. I love winter, now summer that is some scarry shit.
I’m in Dallas, TX - it was 74 degrees yesterday, 20 degrees a few days before. Summer runs about 4 1/2 months, but we do get the occasional ice storm in January or February. Then there’s the tornados and hailstorms - and, did I mention the HEAT in the summer? We’re up for rain for the next few days. And then - perhaps random sleet…well, we never know for sure until it happens.
My thoughts are with those in the COLD areas tonight - light that fire and stay warm!
You know, sometime next summer, when the temp here in Tucson rockets over 100 farenheit, some well-meaning schmo will ask me why I don’t move somewhere nice.
I will think about this thread. I will think about the difference between having it be hot as hell, and having it be cold as hell and windy and slushy and shovelling snow and buying huge expensive coats and wearing huge expensive coats and scraping ice off windshields and slipping on sidewalks and never seeing the sun for day after depressing day after depressing windy cold sleety freezing rainy mournful day, and I will smile.
I will say to well-meaning schmo, “I guess I must just be crazy.”
-MrVisible
(Currently mourning the fact that I’ll have to retire my leather jacket for the year sometime soon.)
It’s 30odd below mother fucking zero at my house right now, if we want to talk about winter. F. though at this point, it gets pretty close together no matter which system you use.
After spending almost four years in Singapore, where there are no seasons and you have the same hot humid gofdawful weather day in day out, I love every season. Even rain-drenched days in winter.
Gaspode: IMHO living in Malmö, which is almost tropical, gives you no say in this matter. I admit that Stockholm, too, isn’t on top of the harsh winters’ list, but I can say to my defence that I have spent two winters in Luleå and I don’t understand how that corner of the World can be populated.