Back when I lived in Washington, I used to despise summer and mostly tolerate winter, because A) I didn't have air conditioning at all in the condo where I lived and the air conditioning at work was mostly busted, at least for a long while until it finally got (mostly) fixed, and B) I at least had heat in the form of electric heaters along the walls in my condo. I remember when my sister and I first made a trip out there, way back in 2004, and the real estate guy was all like, no, I wouldn't even
need an air conditioner because it
never gets above 70°-80°F in the summer (or need all that much heat because it
rarely if ever gets below 40°-50°F in the winter).
Now that I've moved back to North Carolina, however, I've come to hate winter
so much more than I ever hated summer and will likely ever hate summer. Don't get me wrong, I do still hate summer, too, but it's
winter that can go kiss the biggest, hairiest, most encrusted asshole in the world, as far as I'm concerned. Here's an example of the reasons why I feel this way: the water pipes under the kitchen sink burst Friday evening due to freezing and the floor of my bedroom (the lowest point in the house, adjacent to the kitchen) was filled with literally about half an inch of water or more. The pipes were fixed pretty quickly Friday evening thanks to my brother, who is really handy with that sort of thing, unlike me. I only know enough about it to be able to crawl under the house to turn off the water at the main valve coming in from the well. But we only just today got up all of the cloth crap that we'd stuffed in the floor (bed sheets, bath towels, flannel shirts, etc.) to try to soak up the water as best we could. Some of it was literally frozen[1], but then, I figured that that actually made it somewhat easier to deal with, since it'd have been much more annoying had that water still been liquid. We're lucky that we didn't get electrocuted that night due to the water flowing around and up against my space heater and the surge protector it and my computer are plugged into. If the water had gotten much higher, it would have been
inside that stuff. Fortunately, the water was contained to a relatively small area (directly under my computer desk), and didn't spread through the rest of the floor. The floor is still a wee bit damp, but it was dry enough that paper towels didn't even get wet when I put them down on it, and the space heater is doing a pretty good job of drying the rest of it up. Just before I started this entry is the first time I've even turned my computer on since Friday evening.
I'm just glad that I don't live farther north, where they're apparently dealing with this kind of crap weather all the time right now and have been for a while. Not that I plan on moving anywhere else any time soon, but if I did... is there anywhere in the world where it just, like, shifts back and forth only between spring and autumn and bypasses summer and winter entirely? ¬_¬
[1] - The entirety of this house is heated by a single wood-burning stove in a room on the far end of the house, and a set of gas logs in the room adjacent to it, and that's it. Three or four days ago, back when the temperature got down to around 2°F or so during the night, when I got up the next morning, it was around 85°F in the living room (the room with the gas logs), around 50°F in the kitchen adjacent to the living room, and around 30°F the rest of the way from my bedroom through Ma's bedroom and into the bathroom. It was probably well above 90°F in the wood-stove room itself, but we don't have a thermometer in there to know for sure. (The layout of the rooms in the house is kind of a big U-shape, or more like a |_|-shape, starting from the wood-stove room, with the bend being at the kitchen and my bedroom, and then looping back 180° to my mother's bedroom and the bathroom.) Yeah, that's a big part of why I dislike winter so much more than summer now.
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