Livin' la vida metric
There are some good and bad points to being an intellectual or cultural loner, refusing to follow the herd on matters that are otherwise taken for granted. I've always felt that the metric system would be the thing to follow in the U.S. - blame it on a combination of studying in the sciences for years and growing up during the Carter administration, which represented our only serious national foray into the concept. (At least one Congresscritter derided it as being "definitely Communist".)
My biggest attempt at being metric has been to follow the temperature in Celsius on my computer and my Web page. It's working fine, and I appreciate being in step with the rest of the world beyond America's borders, but I also have regained an appreciation for Fahrenheit as well: 0 F is roughly equivalent to "too damn cold" on the official Scooterbird Scale, while 100 F is "too damn hot", and everything else can therefore be classed as a percentage off of those values.
Anyway, speaking metric weather also now gives me a harbinger of fall that no one else really has: the dipping of the temps into single digits. It came damned close on Monday night, which set off the usual mini-bout of depression I get with oncoming winter (since fall seems to last about 45 minutes around here). Now it's back up to 31 today, with a predicted 33 on Friday, so I'm happy again (provided there's A/C or a pool), but we're looking at a low of 13 later in the weekend. It won't be long now, and when it happens, I'll have to face my wistful melancholy alone.
My biggest attempt at being metric has been to follow the temperature in Celsius on my computer and my Web page. It's working fine, and I appreciate being in step with the rest of the world beyond America's borders, but I also have regained an appreciation for Fahrenheit as well: 0 F is roughly equivalent to "too damn cold" on the official Scooterbird Scale, while 100 F is "too damn hot", and everything else can therefore be classed as a percentage off of those values.
Anyway, speaking metric weather also now gives me a harbinger of fall that no one else really has: the dipping of the temps into single digits. It came damned close on Monday night, which set off the usual mini-bout of depression I get with oncoming winter (since fall seems to last about 45 minutes around here). Now it's back up to 31 today, with a predicted 33 on Friday, so I'm happy again (provided there's A/C or a pool), but we're looking at a low of 13 later in the weekend. It won't be long now, and when it happens, I'll have to face my wistful melancholy alone.