I admit it. I am temperature challenged. I can’t ever seem to get the temperature right. Like Goldilocks and her porridge, it’s always a case of too cold or too hot, and never right.
When I lived in Seattle, I thought I had it right. That’s not to say, perfect. I never once lived in any home or apartment that seemed to understand that even the great Northwest should have air conditioning. Cars do. Offices do. But not homes.
As anyone up there knows, it gets unbearably hot at times in Seattle. There can be several days in a row where the temperature hits the mid 90s and it’s sweltering and miserable. Sure, there’s the art of opening windows in the early morning, taking in all the cooler air you can, and then shutting everything up tight for the rest of the day in the pathetic hope that it might stay cool.
Of course, it doesn’t. If you want to see how this really works, fill your refrigerator with red meat. Unplug it at 5 a.m. Open as your would any other day. About 9 p.m., cook dinner.
What? Afraid to eat a little lukewarm meat? This is the concept of cooling in Seattle. It doesn’t work.
We do, however, have heat mastered. Well, at least when the power is on. I remember one ice storm back in the 90s in Port Orchard. The power went off, thanks to all that lovely ice taking up residence on the power lines. It was out for something like three days.
The house continued to get colder and colder and colder. I never knew how cold a house could get without a furnace. It finally leveled off around 55. Sounds like a nice normal day in Seattle but we were going to die in that house. If it weren’t for the neighbor finally coming to the rescue with some wood from his pile, we would have been found in the house eventually, looking like the homeless guy beneath the street in Scrooged. The could have snapped my moustache off, we would be so frozen.
I never had my house extremely warm. Perhaps 71 or 72. I figured that if Southcenter Mall was that temperature, it would work for me.
My condo here in Florida is at 68 now and I am in my woolies. There’s no way to make the house warmer as in a reversed mirror of Seattle, we don’t have a real furnace, only AC that kind of fakes its way through heating.
Why can’t anyone get this heating/cooling thing right where I live?
I know what my Seattle friends are saying right now. “Waaa, cry me a river.”
But it is cold. At least to me. Both in the house and outside, where as I write this, it’s 43 degrees. Yes, you read right. 43 degrees in the middle of Florida.
This would be just fine, if we had heat. Space heaters in a condo lined by Swiss-cheese sliding glass doors aren’t much help. If I could write this column with mittens on, I would.
I just can’t seem to catch a break here.
In the summer, AC is a savior. Everyone says, “Oh, but Florida’s so hot, how can you live there?” Yes, Florida is hot, blissfully so much of the year. For about eight months of the year, its in the 70s to low 80s. While my friends in Seattle are chipping ice off their cars, I am dropping ice into a tropical drink. Then summer arrives and it’s blistering hot.
But no one really cares. We sleep in our AC’d homes, jump in our AC’d cars and head off to our AC’d workplaces. Total time spent in the sub tropical heat – maybe 10 minutes. All our outdoor activities – fairs, farmer’s markets, concerts, etc., happen during the cool months. No one goes to anything in Florida in the summer.
Oddly, this is tourist season here. Well, it’s odd to us here in Florida. The summer is the rainy season as well. It’s also hurricane season. So we marvel at how tourists flock to Florida, the Sunshine State, when it’s the crappiest time of the year weatherwise. We all bitch about the summers, not because of the heat, but because of the rain.
That’s because Florida gets more rain than Seattle does annually. While everyone thinks it rains in Seattle all the time, it mostly just threatens to rain. Sure, the place gets weeks, often a whole month of rain, but not like Florida gets rain. We get buckets of it all at once while Seattlelites get mist, drizzle and maybe, some light rain. No buckets.
When I visited Seattle, which would be about six weeks ago now, the weather was supposed in the 50s, just like it is outside here right now. Well, for some reason, the two temperatures aren’t the same at all. In Seattle, I was in my t-shirt still, barely wore my coat, except when it was raining. Here in Florida, I wouldn’t dream of going outside right now, even if the dog had all her legs crossed and suffering from bladderfullitis.
So, why do I live here in Florida if it’s so cold right now and there’s no real heat? Wouldn’t I be better off in Seattle where they have heat? Boy, that’s a tough one.
As I said, I’m temperature challenged. I still haven’t figured out that whole heat/cold thing. When I first got here, I set the AC to 72, figuring that was the same thing the as the 72 I had my house set to in Seattle. I mean, 72 is 72, right? Nope. Doesn’t work like that. After getting my power bill and freezing for a couple months, I found 76 is perfect in the AC world. When I went back to Seattle, I set the thermostat in the hotel to 72. I ended up having to turn the AC on in the room. Yes, in November, in Seattle, I was running AC.
As you can see, I am just temperature challenged. It doesn’t seem to matter where I am, I am still cursed by the Goldilocks Syndrome, ever in search of a “just right.”
Out on the Treasure Coast, wondering if I still have my stocking hat,
– Robb