Specifically, the space heater. Yes, even though it’s still September and less than a week since summer officially ended, I’ve pulled out the space heater and aimed it at my feet because it’s a bit chilly in here.
When I was heading back home around 6 p.m. it actually felt downright cold. I wasn’t even wearing shorts. Right now my watch is telling me it’s 8ºC outside. I just checked and apparently the average low for today is 10ºC , so this isn’t as outrageous as I thought, but still. I think the change from summer to fall hits harder than any other seasonal shift, because it feels so abrupt. One day I’m wearing t-shirts and shorts and people are complaining about how hot it is, then the next day I’m curling up by a space heater and the shorts have returned to the dresser for the next six months.
Okay, my feet are now too warm and the space heater is off. Maybe I just need to put on an itchy wool sweater or something. I promise my next post will not be about the weather. Almost guaranteed!
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.
Some sun and some cloud
Warm and sometimes also wet
August you snooze me
August was a strange month in how mild it was. We had some hot days, but only a few. We had some rain, but only a little. We had days of cloud, days of sun and most of the time it felt like summer, but it never felt like summer summer, almost as if the real summer weather was always waiting just around the corner.
On the plus side, the occasional soggy weather meant no big forest fires and the pall of smoke that would blanket the skies here for weeks on end never materialized. This was a bonus for air quality, general pleasantness and my running.
So August was kind of boring, weather-wise, but a good kind of boring, especially compared to the heat-blasted hellscape that was so much the rest of the world during summer 2019.
It was cloudy this morning and now a light misty rain is drizzling. Given that we only have a few weeks of potentially hot weather left in the summer, and the forecast has dotted more potential rain on some of these days, it looks like the chance of seeing those FIRE DANGER signs go up is pretty much nil. This is the first time I can recall it never drying out enough to have a fire ban go in effect.
This is good news for trees and stuff. And we’ve still had plenty of sun, so I can’t really complain. It feels weird, though, especially with so many other places broiling all summer under record high temperatures.
Come to think of it, we broke some more records, too, so we haven’t entirely escaped the steady march of global warming, it’s just being sneaky around here this summer.
As we gird for a slippery, wet fall, I wonder what winter will be like. Then I remember it’s still August and to stop being silly.
That’s fine. It’s dry enough that a little rain is good. It makes the grass grow and all that.
Summer rain is kind of weird, though. While it is cooler than normal, it’s not actually cool—it’s 17C right now, which is t-shirt weather. But if you go outside wearing a t-shirt you will come out looking like an entrant in a wet t-shirt contest. Which is handy if you are actually on your way to a wet t-shirt contest. It’s otherwise less desirable.
However, if you wear a jacket…well, it’s too warm to wear a jacket. So you can keep dry, but get all sweaty and gross instead.
Basically, summer and rain don’t really fit together well. Science has obviously failed us here, as there’s no super-light fabric that can deflect raindrops. This is also why I don’t wear a jacket when I run in the rain, even in the winter when it’s actually cold.
The solution, then, is to stay inside and play video games or watch something on one of the five thousand streaming services now available. Hold on, I’ve just received an update—make that 6,000.
It is currently 16C, a little cooler than would be seasonal. It’s partly cloudy, but no serious threat of precipitation yet–that is saved for the weekend, according to the forecast.
The last few months have been a time of certain small triumphs and a lot of ennui. My writing has withered and I’m trying to decide how much I care. I’m not taking part in July’s Camp NaNoWriMo because part of the month I will be on vacation, when my writing is meant to wither. As I type this, the sun is angling to poke through the clouds and I think of how spring has been pretty decent overall, weather-wise. So that’s good, if you ignore the thawing permafrost up north and the steady march onward of climate doom. It doesn’t help that Canadians keep electing not only conservative governments, but breathtakingly ignorant ones in particular.
Anyway, here’s to summer–officially starting tomorrow–being better. It’s my favorite season and I look forward to soaking up some rays and reveling in the warm days ahead. Which are currently not in the long range forecast. But still.
As I type this it is currently 15°C and sunny. The temperature is higher than the seasonal norm and the season–officially Spring as of today–has debuted in spectacular fashion. After a good six weeks of below seasonal temperatures in the last month and a half of winter, this is welcome indeed.
Flowers are flowering, trees are budding and people are already getting sun burns. It’s great.
Cooler, more seasonal temperatures and showers are forecast for next week, but for now we bask in the glory of an early spring, the restorative powers of the sun providing an extra boost to the trials of a typical work day.
This is the date that The Weather Network is promising Vancouver will reach double digits for the daily high for the first time in 100 years. The temperature is alleged to reach 10ºC. I will ya out my shorts and t-shirt that morning in anticipation. They are also forecasting showers, so I will also include an umbrella next to my shorts and t-shirt.
With spring approaching this month and the promise of un-cold weather in the near future, let’s review Winter 2018/19:
December: This month was a bit of a throwback to winters of yore, which is to say it was relatively mild and not-so-relatively wet. It rained a lot and I spent many-a-minute eyeing the traffic roaring at highway speed along Brunette Avenue, hoping to avoid being sprayed by a giant wave kicked up by an 18 wheeler. I was mostly successful. No snow. Yay.
January: Mild with some cold days and pretty dry. This is similar to a lot of the winter weather we’ve had in recent years. I like it. Only a few traces of snow. Yay.
February. The entire month was pretty much 3-6 degrees below seasonal temperatures. And it snowed. Not once, not twice, but more than that. Some snow was wet and gone the same day, but the last snowfall has become semi-permanent as daytime temperatures have been too low to melt it much and nighttime lows have been consistently below freezing. We had an actual snow day at work. I am kind of over the cold and snow now, so no yay.
Early March has been more of the same, with cold temperatures, though it seemingly got up to 9ºC today. While it has been getting slightly warmer, this has been offset by sharp winds that end up making it feel even colder than when it’s cold. No yay.
If I was actually running outside right now…well, I wouldn’t be, because there is too much compact snow on the trails, as was the case two years ago during The Great Snow of 2017. At current rates of melting, the trails might be comfortably run-worthy in two or three weeks–assuming we don’t get more snow or another polar vortex or a frost giant heavy-breathing over the region for a week.
The final question is: Why are people so fascinated by the weather? I can only assume it’s because there’s no way to avoid it. And getting soaked by an 18 wheeler hellbent on hydroplaning is an experience you are not likely to forget.
I used to get irritated over snow. I even have a tag for this blog called damn snow. But now I just don’t care much about it and I have climate change to thank for it.
Let me explain.
The area around southwestern BC is temperate rain forest. This means it rarely gets too hot or too cold. But it does rain a lot. Like, for half the year a lot.
Except it doesn’t do that much anymore.
It used to be that winters were pretty mild—temperatures consistently above freezing—and we got lots of rain, days and weeks of unrelenting rain. You could almost smell the SAD coming off people as they glumly trudged around through one downpour after another, batting their umbrellas against one another on crowded sidewalks.
When we got snow, it was usually because it just got cold enough for it, meaning it was a heavy, wet snow. The cold wouldn’t last long. Sometimes it felt like minutes. And as the temperature rose, the snow would change to rain.
The rain would relentlessly pound away at the accumulated snow, making it into a slush sea and turning intersections into lakes, with the melting snow jamming up all the sewer drains. It made crossing the street a bit of an adventure. Not the good kind of adventure, though, the “Hey, my pants are soaked up to my knees” kind of adventure.
But for some time that hasn’t really happened. Now it’s more typical for snowfall to occur when it’s too cold to change to rain, and when the weather clears, it stays cold, so the snow melts slowly, instead of turning into vast oceans of slush under ceaseless sheets of rain. This is generally a nice change, because it is more pleasant to deal with slowly melting snow than slush rivers that swallow vehicles whole.
The downside is the snow can hang around a lot longer. I think back two years ago, to our last great snowpocalypse. I ran in the first week of December 2016. It snowed a few days later. No biggie, I think, I’ll miss a week while the snow melts away.
It did not melt. It snowed again. It snowed some more and we had a rare white Christmas. We had a white New Year’s Eve. A white Valentine’s Day. Every time the snow started to melt, another system would sweep in, and because it remained cold, it just piled on more snow.
It finally seemed that by early March the snow was going away for good—then it snowed yet again, making it three months where I could not run outside at my preferred locations because they were never not covered in hard-packed, icy snow.
That was a bit of a bummer. I adapted by running on treadmills instead. It hardly ever snows inside.
All of this is likely due to climate change. The winters here, usually mild and wet, are trending toward dry, with snow taking the place of rain. It’s not consistent, of course. This past December was wet and mild, but January was cooler and dry. Not cold—not until this past week, anyway— just dry instead of wet.
I can live with that. In fact, I like it. But I know it’s because the climate is changing and this is the new normal and the new normal is generally going to be Very Bad for humans and so I feel guilty for enjoying it.
But I still enjoy it.
So I no longer curse the damn snow, because while it can be more persistent than before, winters are overall a lot nicer than they used to be, even if it means we as a species are probably doomed. You take the good with the bad.
We’ve had a rainfall warning the last few days, which, as you might guess, means a whole lot of rain– between 40-90 mm, depending on where exactly you are. It’s been quite wet.
The Rains
The rains fall heavy Vehicles splash and spray me My spirit is damp
The rain actually doesn’t bother me–this is definitely the wrong area to live if it does–and I’ve learned to avoid the areas where splashing and spraying can happen.
But I still remember that dark winter day last year when I was learning that lesson, diverting along the one block stretch of Brunette Avenue between the Sapperton SkyTrain station and my place, unable to take the much nicer hospital lane, closed (and still closed until December 2019) due to construction. This section of Brunette tends to be driven at highway speeds. I don’t know what the actual speed limit is here, but I am reasonably certain it’s not highway speed. The combination of excess water on the road and the aforementioned high speed led to me getting soaked with a great wave of water that fanned over the sidewalk. I stood for a moment, trying to register the fact that this little slice of a comedy movie had actually happened to me.
I walked on and got soaked three more times. I was very wet when I got home. In the end I found it kind of funny. And instructive. I’ve never risked the same trip along Brunette again during The Rains. The safe diversion adds two blocks to my trip, a small price to pay in exchange for not getting a metric ton of water sprayed on me at high velocity.
