It was all about the weather today. A cold front with rain came in overnight, blowing cold air from the south. Sydney’s maximum temperature today was 14.5°C at 1:30am, but really that barely counts, as it never rose above 13.4°C during daylight, and for most of the day it was more like 12°C or less. This was accompanied by intermittent cold rain, and steady winds putting the “feels like” temperature more like 7°C. But even the middle of the night 14.5°C made this easily the coldest day of the year, by a good two degrees.
I only went outside very briefly to pick Scully up (in the car) from my wife’s work at lunchtime, and to take her out for a toilet around 5pm. It was freezing and awful outside. Even Scully wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible.
This morning I wrote my critical thinking/ethics class for this week. I normally do it on Tuesday, but I did my university marking yesterday because my Tuesday evening class currently has no kids enrolled, giving me an extra day to write my lesson plan. The topic is “Science Fiction”, and I thought this would be very interesting and have some cool questions. But in my first class tonight I realised that a lot of the questions are very yes/no type, with not much opportunity for interesting reasoning or discussion. So I modified them a bit in the subsequent lessons, which went better.
The apartment next door to ours has been listed for sale since February, and they finally had an auction on Saturday, where it sold. When the real estate agency had moved display furniture into the place for photography and in-person inspections, they ignored the sign in the lift that says “don’t block the doors with furniture”, and broke the lift. After the sale on the weekend, today they moved the furniture back out… and broke the lift again. So I had to go up and down the fire stairs with Scully several times, instead of using the lift.
Final word for today: Brrrr!! 🌬️🌧️🥶
I find it interesting that perceptions and language can be very different. Where I live, the daily high temperatures have been above maybe 12ºC for some weeks now – and I think it’s a perfectly good t-shirt weather. Today it was 12ºC and light drizzle in the morning when I left for work, and it was just fine. It’ll be warmer in the afternoon, probably not reaching 20ºC.
Also, for me, ‘freezing’ means it’s, well, freezing, so under 0ºC. It can be cold before that (and usually the weather feels colder a bit above zero than a bit below it, because of moisture in the air), but it’s not ‘freezing’.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, different language users and contexts, but I’m literal enough with this that I’d at least side-eye you if you’d say that when it’s not below zero.
Yeah, well, it never gets to literal “freezing” here, so using the word figuratively is the only way I have of using it. 😀
In 12°C I go out in a shirt, sweater, and jacket, and I still feel cold.
Yeah, it was obvious that the freezing was not literal.
Though I’m probably one of the more cold resistant people here. I don’t use shorts, but when I went about last week in a t-shirt, and a cap (and jeans), there were people with thick jackets and knit caps on. Also, like we discussed earlier, our apartments and houses usually are kept at least 19-20˚C all year – higher than that in the summer, but usually not lower.