Posted on Saturday, 19 August 2023 Source vaspider Via vaspider

vaspider:

girl-with-the-most-cake:

vaspider:

websurfingspider:

moiracolleenodell:

afishtrap:

vaspider:

I was young, so it feels like something I read in a book sometimes. I remember how chilly it could get at night in the summer, which doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore.

That’s actually the thing that seems to keep popping back up in my mind - that like, it was really chilly in the mornings in summer even, and it would warm up, and it seems to just kind of… stay warm all the time.

I dunno. The seasons were more distinct, there were bigger temperature swings on individual days, and like… weather was more predictable on a seasonal basis, if not on a daily basis.

Like… the kind of seasons you read about in Olde Tyme Books? They… were real things. We didn’t always have snow on Winter Break, but we had a pretty predictable number of snow days?

And it almost feels silly to talk about it. “What were normal seasons like, Uncle Spider?”

But yeah.

Watch seasonal-based movies made before about 1975 – ones set around Easter, or Halloween, or New Year’s – and pay attention to what people are wearing. Late October? It got cold when the sun went down, like ‘put on a jacket’ cold and I’m not talking northern US, I’m talking Georgia.

Today (Aug 18) is only a week before the start of most public schools in the US. A week from now? Back then, it’d already be chilly in the morning, enough to need a windbreaker on the way to school. By midday it would’ve warmed up, but even in Georgia the mornings had a nip to them by end of August, start of September.

And in northern Virginia, not sure about now, but the schools used to plan for ten snow days a year. I recall one year we had eleven days off thanks to a foot or so of fresh snow every two or three days. Even in years we didn’t use all the snow days, there were still frequent late openings and early closings. It wasn’t all that uncommon for summer vacation to start a week later, because those days had to be made up, somewhere.

Locally, this summer has (despite the terrible heat elsewhere in the US) been a strange bit of callback to my childhood. Excepting two nights all summer, every night it’s dropped to 72F at the highest, but most often in the 60s – with the caveat that it sometimes took half the night to get there. It’s not a sharp drop like I remember, as a child. But at least it has been cool enough to leave the windows open and a fan on – and that’s the kind of summer I grew up with, in Alabama and Georgia (regions significantly warmer, otherwise, than the mid-atlantic where I live now).

That sharp drop was the reason my dad installed a whole-house fan every place we lived: because the evening air would legitimately drop a good 5-10 degrees as the sun set. Enough to open the windows, run the fan, and the whole house would cool right down by dinnertime.

Now? If we go by last summer, even having a house set up perfectly (central open staircase) for a whole-house fan, what’s the point if the temperature stays just as high after the sun goes down, as it was before?

Yeah, I remember having to wear a coat over my Halloween costume (and being seriously angry about it, because what’s the point of the costume if no one can see it?) and having the windows open in the evenings. Now I don’t dare leave the windows open overnight because it gets so hot so fast in the morning.

I’m in the pacific northwest and while we’ve had some really freaky weather this year in particular (like, February levels of cold happening in June levels of freaky), overall it has been getting hotter and hotter every year. And yeah, it doesn’t really cool down in the evenings in summer anymore. It can be 2 in the morning and still too hot to sleep, and it starts getting unbearably hot before the sun is even all the way risen.

Yeah it was 85 degrees at midnight on Tuesday in Portland this week.

I grew up in Houston in the 1980s.

I was on the swim team and in June, the pool would be chilly at 8am. And we’d freeze at swim meets once the sun went down. July was much hotter. July and August were the only times we’d see it over 100 and those were rare enough that I wasn’t allowed to play outside.

In the winter, freezes were rare and never lasted long. That’s not nostalgia—I remember some years we wouldn’t buy heavy coats.

The weather IS worse. Hotter in the summer and colder in the winter.

Oh yeah. It WAS cold at swim practice in the morning, wasn’t it? I was in MD when I was little, but it was like… it was chilly. You really had to stretch and warm up so you didn’t hurt yourself from the cold water.

It’s still regularly hitting the 90s and even 100s where I’m at. This IS a more deserty area of the state than some others, but it’s still not normal for it to stay this hot this long.

I remember having regular WEATHER as a kid. By that I mean sometimes it just rained, and sometimes it just snowed. It wasn’t all big storms. We didn’t constantly track (and break) records of “when” and “how much.”