Weather for happiness
May. 25th, 2017 07:49 amThanks to a high-pressure system this morning is warm and sunny. Dundee is generally relatively sunny and today's temperature is projected to reach around 70°F which is nothing by American standards but pleasant nonetheless. Still, while wearing a short-sleeved shirt on my drive into work, I brought a sweater in to counter our building's climate control. This is a common occurrence: for example, I recall working as a research assistant in the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering one summer and often walking out into a wall of heat at the end of the day, then the next summer I was a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University and encountered the same phenomenon, enough that I would bring trousers to change into from my shorts once I had arrived at my office and its cooler climate. (I have not needed to wear shorts here in Scotland.) I wonder how much energy we would save by not managing office buildings' climate quite as needlessly aggressively as seems commonplace.
My good feeling this morning in the sunshine reminds me of how much I enjoy such weather. Indeed, I might now have been working in University of Arizona's Department of Computer Science if not for those meddling kids: I was much attracted by the weather and a great-looking job vacancy for which I was very well qualified but my impressions of Tucson's public school system prevented me as a parent from risking such a move. Providence's schools already turned out to be quite bad enough, we left there after one academic year, not that we had moved there for the weather.
In returning to the US someday it would of course be good if that did make me as much happier as expected; I do indeed already bear climate in mind when considering to where I might move. Usual American house features like good porches and wire mesh for windows are also important though at our present house I do at least have a table in the back yard at which I can sit. The house I owned in Ohio had three separate porches. Locally we are not much troubled by winged hematophagic grazers; the insects that do fly into the house can become stimulating playthings for our cat.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mst3kmoxie would note with disdain that the snakes that entered our house in Ohio similarly became playthings; I would try to clean up their remains before she came downstairs in the morning.
Update: It reached 77½°F.
My good feeling this morning in the sunshine reminds me of how much I enjoy such weather. Indeed, I might now have been working in University of Arizona's Department of Computer Science if not for those meddling kids: I was much attracted by the weather and a great-looking job vacancy for which I was very well qualified but my impressions of Tucson's public school system prevented me as a parent from risking such a move. Providence's schools already turned out to be quite bad enough, we left there after one academic year, not that we had moved there for the weather.
In returning to the US someday it would of course be good if that did make me as much happier as expected; I do indeed already bear climate in mind when considering to where I might move. Usual American house features like good porches and wire mesh for windows are also important though at our present house I do at least have a table in the back yard at which I can sit. The house I owned in Ohio had three separate porches. Locally we are not much troubled by winged hematophagic grazers; the insects that do fly into the house can become stimulating playthings for our cat.
mst3kmoxie would note with disdain that the snakes that entered our house in Ohio similarly became playthings; I would try to clean up their remains before she came downstairs in the morning.Update: It reached 77½°F.
