Wearing shorts is not exactly unusual in the summer. I’ve been wearing them most days, though recently the weather has taken on a more fall-like aspect, leading me to occasionally wear horrible long pants.
But today the temperature climbed close to 20 degrees and the sun came out, so the shorts went on. It was nice. Being the second to last day of summer, and with rain forecast for tomorrow (update: It is very much raining on the last official day of summer), this is likely the last time I’ll wear shorts for summer 2019 and thus it shall be recorded here.
Summer 2019 was a bit odd. After two consecutive years of the worst forest fires ever, accompanied by weeks of haze hanging over the city due to the ever-present fires (see the yellow-tinged look to every photo I took on Barnston Island for evidence), this year I never even saw the FIRE DANGER signs go up at Burnaby Lake or the Brunette River, the first time this hasn’t happened since I moved to New West in 2011.
One of the reasons we opted for a mid-July vacation instead of late August was to reduce the chance of hitting a fire ban, because camping without campfires is sad and unCanadian. But the fire ban never came.
While we did have some hotter days, they were fewer in number and we never really had a hot stretch where everyone lamented how hot it was and wouldn’t it be nice if it cooled down and rained a little–at which point people would effortlessly switch to griping about the rainy, non-summer-like weather.
Running-wise it was great. I never encountered more than a few sprinkles on my runs and most of the time it was surprisingly comfortable for jogging, with a nice balance between warmth and humidity. I saw very few instances of dry mouth and nearly every time it was humid (sweat city) it was offset by temperatures being lower. And not having to run with fine particulate smoke hanging in the air was nice, too.
And yet I still lament in a small way the lack of a “traditional” summer where it gets hot and sticky (and stinky) and people complain about the heat. Because as horrible as it might be for running, as bad as it may be for the skin, and as terrible it might be with the greater risks to our forests burning, that feels like summer.
With the leaves turning and fall officially started tomorrow, I’m already thinking about winter. The long term forecast seems to be suggesting it will be milder and maybe wetter? I don’t think anyone really knows, given the climate upheaval we are clearly in the middle of. I’m just hoping there’s no snowpocalypse to match 2016-17.
But before the snow, there is still some time for more possible wearing of shorts before it gets a little too chilly to be a reasonable thing to do. Checking the 10 day forecast, the best opportunity appears to be…this Tuesday, with a forecast of mostly cloudy and a high of 18. After that we are definitely in more “people will start looking at you funny” territory.
