In my youth, I thought snow was pretty neat. I enjoyed it when I went to college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I even took up cross country skiing.
For lots of strange reasons, mostly cheap land and the love of cold weather, I moved to Nova Scotia after college and eventually ended up with a commercial cattle operation in New Brunswick.
In January of 1982, we saw the thermometer register minus 40 degrees which as most folks know is the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius agree on the temperature.
About five years after that we started moving south. The first southern move from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Columbia, Maryland was a real shock to the system.
Homes and cars in Halifax didn't even have air conditioners in those pre-global warming days.
Columbia for good reasons was one of the most air conditioned places on earth, and I took a job which required me to wear a suit most days. I couldn't even face mowing the yard.
There were more things than the heat, but we only lasted a couple of years before we moved farther south, but we also went westward and up in altitude.
We ended up in a much more temperate spot on the side of the mountain in Roanoke, Va. As the manager of Apple Computer's higher education business in the Mid-Atlantic, I got to adopt tan pants and long sleeve shirts as my uniform. The suits were gone.
That worked well for many years until in the mid-nineties Apple reorganized, and I ended up in the business division working mostly in the Washington area which I have called land of the suits.
I left that world in 2004 and in the fall of 2006 found a home in coastal Carolina.
My guess is that except for the wonderful breezes we have on the coast and the much less polluted air, the climate isn't too much different here in coastal Carolina than in the Maryland we saw in 1987.
Twenty years later that heat feels pretty good. I even mowed the yard the other day when it was a little over ninety degrees. Other than some sweat I found the job pretty pleasant.
This morning I was talking to college roommate who lives in Halifax. According to the Weather Underground and his local paper Halifax is beginning the day at 7 degrees Celsius or 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a typically Canadian refusal to acknowledge cold temperatures, he maintains the temperature is 52 degrees.
The same college roommate has a second home in Pittsboro, NC. During the July and August heat, he fled back to Canada. He was horrified to hear that that as his return to the states nears, the high temperatures in central North Carolina are still in the mid-nineties.
My comment was that I hope the day time highs stay near ninety since it takes that to keep the outdoor swimming pools enjoyable.
That heat lets me justify my summer Realtor® uniform of shorts and a polo shirt. I would like to stay in that uniform until early December. Even the picture on my Realtor® site shows how heat is now my friend. It was taken in January on the beach, and all I needed to stay warm was a long sleeve shirt.
It is funny how we change over our lives, what once seemed intolerable now makes my day enjoyable.
There was a time when I enjoyed a good snow storm.
I still like them.
They make good reading while I am sitting in the warmth of the Carolina sun.
Snow and ice, that's for northerners and certainly not anything we want on the beach.
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