It’s funny the things you miss when you leave home. I genuinely miss the humidity, and I get the feeling that people don’t believe me. Most people here have never actually felt humidity, but they’ve heard their entire lives how dreadful it is.
It’s one of the things I look forward to when I go back east.
Not exactly true. You don’t judge clothes by their looks but by their warmth. And you pay a very close attention to weather reports…
I’ve realized that I look outside to see the temperature by how big the vapour plumes are coming out of people’s chimneys, and by how the snow looks. And snow sounds different at all different temperatures. When it’s squeaking, it’s cold.
(Dancer_Flight, I stay out for extended periods at any temperature. I do have to keep moving fast when it’s extremely cold, though.)
As others have said, you just cope with it. It’s not like you have much choice about it. You do stuff like carrying a “blizzard kit” in your car – a sleeping bag, an empty tin can and some candles and matches, maybe a collapsible shovel like an army entrenching tool. You wear a hat. You wear mittens, not gloves. If you have to work outside you get a good set of insulated coveralls or insulated bibbers and a good quality hooded sweatshirt and pack boots. You always carry jumper cables. You just deal with it. We can’t really close the place up for 90 or 120 days.
Just like the humidity is worse than the heat, the wind is worse than the cold. Twenty below is not that bad if the wind is calm. If there is a good stiff wind off the Canadian prairies then twenty below is flat out dangerous and has the potential to kill you quite abruptly. You judge this by the rate at which saliva freezes. Frosted mustache and beard is no big deal. Frosted nostrils – on the inside– is no fun. Frosted eyelashes it’s time to go inside and read Robert Service poems.
So how do you people in the South deal with summer? There is a limit to how many cloths you can take off!
Just about everywhere indoors is air-conditioned. And showers are good.
On a Christmas day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail
Talk of your cold, through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail
And if our eyes we’d close than our lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see.
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
Oh yeah. Second year I was here in the PNW as a TX expat, I was looking for a condo.
“What do you MEAN, houses/flats don’t come with central AC?!” :eek:
At that moment, my world tipped up on edge. Damn-near every house I ever went by in TX had some form of cooling system, whether it be central AC, window AC, or a swamp cooler.
And it also helps if you were born without an internal heating system and depend on the sun to regulate your temperature. 
(I used to pride myself that I didn’t actually start sweating until about an hour or two out in +90F weather.)
(man. I miss burning my butt when I get into the car without testing the seat surface temperature first…)
I spent a few years living in Muffin’s part of the world working outside in the winter, 30 to 40 below F, never mind wind chill taking survey notes with bare hands rushing back from my instrument between readings to my warm truck running constantly all day which I had to plug in for the night. Some mornings after eating a hearty breakfast, the sheer cold air breaking through my lungs as I stepped outside would cause me to throw up my lovely breakfast into the snow. And when I got back inside I would have to melt off the icicle growth off my moustache.
I will admit the experience was exhilarating in a masochistic way, and the warm evening relief highly cherished.
How did I deal with it? I moved to the west coast.
Dear God. That wind will take your breath away. On 49 Street in Yellowknife, there is a high-rise condo building, and the wind whips around there like it’s beating a red-headed stepchild. Even wearing a mother hubbard and a scarf wrapped around your face, you will be Very Cold. It seriously will just take the breath right out of you. I tended to walk backward on that street.
I remember quite clearly which day that would fall on in Yellowknife. There would still be snow until the end of April at the earliest, sometimes into May, but we would have A Spring Day somewhere around my ex-bil’s birthday, April 30. We would barbecue.
Who else has had tourists ask about your ‘electric car’? 
My friend moved to Calgary from Toronto - her uncle teased her when she got here that the cars were all electric. It was then that she realized that she wasn’t in nice, warm Toronto anymore. And Calgary winters are nice and mild, compared to Saskatchewan/Manitoba winters.
You do get used to it after a while. Plus there is always a colder day coming to add perspective to it.
“It’s cold out, but at least it’s not as cold as yesterday.”
Count me in as someone who likes the winter. I’d never imagined that I would as a kid and teenager, but eleven years in Colorado made me long for seasons.
It’s not so much winter that’s great, it’s the whole package - BIG seasons. You never look outside and wonder if it’s winter, spring, summer, or fall. Summer is lovely here - rarely gets above 85F or so, humidity is just at the point where you stay moisturized but never feel dry, and the beach in the summer is glorious. Fall is beautiful, too - BIG fall colors, a definite snap in the air, and that musty autumn smell of dead leaves and the upcoming winter.
Winter is one of the nicest seasons. It’s not bitterly cold here - average between 0 and 20 degrees F during the day - and we get a LOT of snow. Right now I’m looking out my office window at the evergreens, covered with a thin layer of white. The snow is coming down heavy, and the flakes are thick and almost warm looking.
I can go outside and snowshoe or ski, and if you dress right and keep moving your problem will be keeping cool, not keeping warm. The stark white looks clean and beautiful, like you stepped into a black and white photograph.
Spring? Now spring sucks. Muddy and gross. Luckily it doesn’t last long.
That’s how I cope. You concentrate on the good things and avoid the bad - the same thing you do if you live in a place that gets too hot or humid in the summer. It’s all attitude. You tell me this or this isn’t a lovely landscape.
I think it’s totally a matter of getting used to it - and the proper equipment.
When I first got here 2 years ago I felt like I was freezing everywhere, including indoors. For six months I wore longjohns and sweaters.
Now I don’t have a problem running outside maybe a block in short sleeves in -40 as long as there’s ** no wind. **
WIND is the enemy. If dressed properly, I could walk around in -50 all day. It’s when that -50 plus a 40mph wind makes it feel like -80 you wish you were dead. You can’t breathe because the cold burns your lungs and sinuses. Just keeping your eyes open freezes them, so they start watering. The tears get in your eyelashes and they freeze shut. THAT sucks.
When I actually go outside for any amount of time (snowmobiling, maybe) this is what I wear:
Goretex underwear and undershirt
Tshirt/sweatpants
thin sweater
insulated windpants
Very heavy parka (Canada Goose brand, down filled. Some movies set in the arctic or antarctic have the characters wearing these)
Sealskin mitts (VERY warm)
scarf
toque
Boots good to -100 with wool socks
Dress like that and you’ll be fine. It actually feels good to ‘beat the cold’.
Athena, where are you?
I’m in Indiana and its not uncommon for winter to sometimes reach -15F with the wind chill. It sucks, but its not a big deal. You just wear a heavy coat, a hat, gloves if your coat doesn’t have hand pockets and try not to walk further than you need to. I’ve never had any problem with freezing indoors, even when the heat breaks I just use 3 blankets and its not a big problem. The people who live in northern Canada where it reaches -50F have it bad. But its all relative I guess, I was watching something on the science channel about cold climates and in one where the temps are really low parents let their kids play outside in -30F weather.
Its the ice on the roads that are really dangerous. I don’t mind the cold, that isn’t so bad if you insulate yourself.
Da UP, eh, just like what my location says.
Meaning, I’m about as far north as most of the non-Alaska US people, and farther north than at least a few of the Canadians.
I was going to ask Athena the same thing.
One of the reasons I do like Colorado, even where I live, (high in the mountains) is the seasons. Winter is half the year, then mud season (spring), beautiful (though short) summer, and winter again. Fall is very short, and doesn’t really deserve to be recognized.
The Denver area has a nice mix of the seasons. Never too hot or cold. Snow does not last long. But there are the four seasons.
I don’t know if I would like summer all the time. But I know I couldn’t take winter all the time. I do like the change of seasons.
I also think it has to do with the general weather patterns and humidity. Cold and humidity is bad news. Also, back east, the gloom and cloudy skies seem to last for days and days. In the west, we get a day or two of snow, and then bright blue skies.
Concur. With the Gore Tex clothes and layers I have at my disposal, I don’t often have a need for it, but when I do, my Canada Goose Snow Mantra is the best money I ever spent.
When I was a kid in Sask, I don’t remember school ever being cancelled due to cold. And it got cooooold.
enipla, fall in Calgary is long and beautiful. I would say it is our best season.
I lived in the Denver/Boulder area for 11 years. As far as I’m concerned, they have no seasons. It’s always sunny, and varies between about 30 degrees to about 95 degrees. By the time I moved back to Michigan, I was longing for a grey stormy day, or snow that lasted more than a couple days. When we finally did move, one of the most fun things was waking up every morning and opening the curtains to see what kind of a day it was going to be - you could wake up to just about anything, and the anticipation was fun.
The mountains in Colorado have more real seasons, but if I was going to move somewhere remote where I had little chance of getting a job, it was da UP, not the mountains.
Interesting Anecdote: The first year I was here, I wanted to put a garden in and called the local nursery in May to find out when the frost date - the date after which frost is unlikely and you can plant tender flowers and vegetables outside - and the lady laughed at me. “There is no frost date here,” she said, “It’s snowed every month of the year!”
