Let's talk about the weather

When you are outside of the US and watch CNN, the impression is that it is a tad weather obsessed. It is all about storm front this, high pressure system that, category 5 hurricane the other. Surely, there are other things to interest people.

We have been here just over a week and we, it isn't going to surprise you, have bought in to the weather obsession. Part of the obsession is, of course, trying to reconcile what the 'written' weather is saying with the 'actual' weather that is outside. The major issue is that the weather is, for intents and purposes, invisible. You can't just go a window and see what it is. Moreover, you do not want to open the window, lest you find out while wearing inappropriate attire. And the open of actually going out and seeing seems costly again given the attire issue.

So what happens when I look it up on the Internet? In that case, it tells me it is currently 20 degrees outside. That is, of course, 20 degrees Fahrenheit but with my brain circuitry wired for Celsius it is hard for me to accept that it is really the -7 the 'conversion' algorithms tell me it is. In any case, what the heck is -7 degrees anyway? Remember, the lowest we ever get in Melbourne is around 5 degrees. So the best I have it is 12 degrees colder than really cold. But it is an abstract notion.

One indication that we have regarding what -7 degrees is, is what it does to an iPhone left in a car outside. For your information, it freezes, rock solid. The only application that works is that one where you use your fingers to wipe the condensation off the screen. By the way, an iPhone takes about 2 hours to thaw at 'room' temperature.

And it gets worse because the -7 degrees is just the temperature. There is another temperature that seems more relevant to me and that is the 'feels like' temperature. At the moment, that is 8 degrees F or -13 degrees C. So I lose another 6 degrees just for being a human with feelings! Who knows what it feels like to an iPhone. Near as I can tell, this is a big fat warning to not go out.

Sadly, that can't always been avoided. Now I know that this next thought is hardly original: what I want is the Weather Channel to tell me what I should wear. Helpful readers told me what to buy (and I am grateful and happy to report we haven't lost anyone, yet) but with a full closet, the whole, what to wear issue is looming large. If the Weather Channel can tell me what it feels like, why can't it tell me what it feels like as I add and remove various bits of apparel? One could imagine even specifying it by particular coat, jump, thermals and brand. Consider the advertising possibilities: "if you just had an LL Bean ridiculously large and puffy parker, it would feel like 17 degrees to you now, instead with what you have got it will feel like -3 degrees. Would you like the nearest directions to LL Bean?" To my economist's mind, there seems to be missing markets all over the place.

For us, the issue is that the weather changes. It can do so from minute to minute making it impossible to optimise clothes. We can be cold and all of the children have ample incentive to keep various layers, scarves and gloves on. Then it gets warmer and the extremities get exposed. Then it gets colder, and we engage in a freezing search for lost gloves. Now I know that we need to sow them on but just haven't had the time. That will happen because for the moment, our entire Boston experience is a continual concern about losing gloves. Why they can't put an RF chip in these things with a location finder, I don't know.

We are told it is unseasonably cold at the moment. That is all very well at the moment but it is the word 'unseasonably' that has me worried. That means there is a season for this cold and it is coming. And it will come with snow which our children are yet to really see. My only hope is that it doesn't come with 'unprecedented' cold.

Update: some of my wish has just come through. This site translates your weather into Star Wars terms. The snap shot below is what I am facing. Where is a dead tauntan when you need one.

Cold, Clothing and Fatality Risk

In just a few weeks, we will set out from sunny (currently 30 degree plus) Melbourne to Boston where there is, right now, sunny but that hasn't stopped single digit temperatures emerging. Of course, it is November and give it another few weeks and Boston will be colder than we have ever experienced. Our strategy up until this point had been to avoid all that but that point is now passed.

What this means, of course, is that neither one of us has ever muttered to our children, "don't go out like that, you'll catch your death of cold." Indeed, we were never told that by our parents either. What we are more likely to do is to cake our children in protective elements during much of the year when the sun exists. In Australia, sun cancer is such a real fear that we have thrown everything at it including what I suspect is a widespread Vitamin D deficiency that future medical researchers will enjoy pouring over. We don't want anyone going out like that and catching their death of sun.

To see the depth of the problem, this year, my now 11 year old daughter decided she liked shorts and relented to wearing anything else for just a couple of weeks of the deepest winter this year. Suffice it to say, this may not cut it in Boston. Now you might have though that one reason for this is that she would catch her death of cold. But according to the almost five minutes of research I conducted assessing the risk of fatality from cold exposure with inappropriate clothing, your risk of the common cold doesn't really increase although there might be an issue with the flu. Thanks to widespread media coverage of a shortage of swine flu vaccines in the US, we all got ourselves the 'family pack' vaccination just last week. So the flu risk seems minimal although my daughter did possibly contract a side-effect, throwing up going home from school and literally taking a tram out of commission. Talk about side effects with collateral damage!

There is, of course, a risk of being cold if you don't have appropriate clothing. Now a key parental role is to teach your children things like 'how to dress?' This is like other parental roles I wasn't aware of until alerted to them. For instance, when our daughter was one year old, we stupidly picked up a parenting manual in a bookstore and learned that she should be able to do 'pat a cake.' We asked her to do this and she couldn't. Later it transpired that it would have helped had we known how to pat cakes.

Which brings me to the issue that I, with my caking patting wisdom am forecasting, that we can't teach our children to dress because we don't know how to dress. I'm the only one of us who has lived outside of Australia and that was four years in Palo Alto. And while during my first winter there in 1990, I suffered greatly because of the sheer cold, I did learn to deal with it after purchasing my first 'coat' which was a garment you put on outside but not in. Who would have thought it? Apparently, all over the world, people are changing their clothes as they change their exposure to walls and roofs. How do they live?

So now I am going to turn to you, who have made it this far reading about my lack of knowledge of basic weather management, to suggest the items that we need to purchase in order to protect our children. Bear in mind that (a) we don't have this stuff; (b) will have to purchase at least one set of them within a day of arriving in Boston and (c) have no real idea of the terminology for things. Now another commenter suggested LL Bean as the font of all that is good in this regard except that they don't seem to exist within an hours drive of Boston (so that might be good for the extra sets that we will surely need). But what list should we take to like Macys, Target or something right on Day 1? Specifically, fill in the blank, "if you don't put on BLANK you will catch your death of cold!" Over to you.