The weather is cooling rapidly now. No more snow since the big storm last week, but the temperatures have been dipping down low overnight - we've had several good hard frosts. Even the squirrels are getting up later in the morning when it is warmer.
The other night it got down to twenty five degrees, which I'm used to thinking of as comfortable room temperature, but which here is a chilly frost. Though that's not as disconcerting as temperatures reaching one hundred degrees in the summer, which to me sounds like I should be actually on fire, rather than just feeling like I am.
Yes, this Fahrenheit business is all very confusing. Like all the other measures here it takes a bit of getting used to. I have to try to remember that sixty something is room temperature and a hundred or thereabouts is blood temperature and so on. But it's a little more complicated with temperature, too, because it is not just that a degree of Fahrenheit is smaller than a degree of Celsius, but the zeroes are in different places. That really throws me.
I'm very used to talking about temperatures below zero as being freezing, because that's where water freezes in Celsius. But water freezes at thirty two degrees Fahrenheit. If you say the temperature is below zero here you mean not just cold but bits-of-you-turn-blue-and-fall-off cold. I still catch myself in the winter about to say "below zero" and quickly substitute "below freezing". Except when I forget. Then I get the odd looks suggesting I have a poor grasp on reality. You know, as if I ordered mayonnaise on my salad, or something.
And here comes another winter. Another opportunity to hone my vocabulary into a more US-friendly form. At least in public. In private I'll think whatever I like because there's nobody around to give me a frosty look.
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