How’s the weather

How I would love the weather to be like this right now.

Yes, it’s another post about weather and winter, but not really.

But no, it’s more like this.

I grew up surrounded by the metric system.  I learned to measure in kilometers, kilograms, and Celsius.  Not everything, mind you, I do measure my weight in pounds and my height in feet and inches.  At work I measure in several different units; inches, centimeters, picas, agate lines and pixels.

But with measuring the weather, Celsius has always been the unit I use.  It just makes more sense.  When water freezes, it’s zero.  When it boils, it’s 100.  And when it’s -40 it’s exactly the unit that people in the United States will understand (shocking revelation, the rest of the world actually measures in metric).  So, I’m used to reading the temperature as +32 or -15.  Such as this morning, it’s -21 with a wind from the north west at 9 kilometers per hour, which makes it feel like -28.  That last part is windchill, which is a completely different monster than Celsius.

I’ve grown so used to it, that when I see someone post their weather app screen capture from their phone, I’m at a loss until I realize that it’s in Fahrenheit.  And when I see it as reading 7, I have to remind myself that it’s closer to -13.  Sometimes I’ll see 32, which I know is zero (and that’s still warmer than what it is now).  And I know that -40 in F is -40 in C, and after that it doesn’t matter because it’s all stinking cold and no one should be moving about when it gets down to that.

At one time, I recall I had to know exactly what the conversions were.  Back when I worked in radio, because a lot of the farmers that listened still used Fahrenheit.  So, when we’d say something like “the current temperature in the Rosetown area is -20 Celsius, that’s -4 Fahrenheit”.  We’d always have to make sure that the conversion was there.

So, yes, this may indeed be a mindless ramble about metric system and temperature, but it’s something I find rather interesting from time to time and isn’t that what a blog is all about.  Writing about things that may interest one on occasion.  Today, or at least this morning, that’s what interests me.