h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Don't worry - I didn't think you were being unsympathetic or anything like that. It mostly amuses me how subjective our conceptions of 'hot' or 'cold' weather can be. Like you said, what's bitterly cold for one person can be absolutely fine for another.
(My dad told me once about a documentary show he watched - yeah, I know, that's quite a removed source, sorry - where the guy was talking to some people in Middle-of-Nowherekutzk, Siberia, and they told him the following about the difference between -30°C and -40°C: 'Well, when it's -30 you can still go out and work, but when -40 it's _really_ cold'... Yup, definitely subjective!)

Chicago also gets extreme heat in the summer, right? It's not one of those places where people are fine with minus-whatever winters, but then once it's 20°C out they start spalshing around in fountains and saying how it's terribly hot out (again, everything's subjective).


The mushroom soup sounds excellent! My mother makes a similar one, also with pearl barley.
And next time I make the garlic soup, I think I might just cook some potato in it, which should make it nicely creamy when blended, and then dropping the cream. Also, I'll probably use more garlic. Original recipe did say that the flavour was subtle (despite having 44 cloves of garlic), but it might be a bit _too_ subtle for me, I love garlic.

Down here on the Gulf Coast of Texas, 5C can be miserably cold with the humidity and wind.

But Northern transplants down here just love to laugh at all us locals bundling up when the temps drop below 10C.

I explain it to them this way.

When you see Texans put on their winter clothes, it's not necessarily that we're thin blooded. It's not that we feel we NEED to bundle up in our thickest winter coat, it's that we CAN wear our thickest winter coats. We bought them, we want to wear them. And our 2 week winters don't give us much opportunity to show them off without sweating.

I remember that from Memphis.

Heh, it's pretty much the same here. I love getting a chance to bundle up in a coat and hat and scarf and gloves and whatnot.

I've come to think of it as a type of holiday - once a year or so we get snow, and we have our traditional clothes (winter gear, and lots of it) and traditional food (hot chocolate, soups, other cold-weather foods) and traditional, err, traditions (going out for a walk in the snow, taking pictures, often building a snowman)... it's all just what you do, because yay, it's snowing!

no worries Lady P

when it snows again = instructions

PS: I don't wear hats

Baron Grim made me laugh, because my relatives down in Florida (they're transplants, we're originally from the Chicago suburbs) say the same thing. My nephew needs a heavy jacket when it's 20C, and at that point is when I start going around in short sleeves. The last time I visited my parents while my mother was alive, she had the heat set to 26C. I had to sleep out on the lanai, as I can't handle temps that warm indoors without air con.

Chicago summers can be pretty hot. Not as hot as Texas, though! We also get quite high humidity, which is what makes me so miserable.

What makes me laugh sometimes is just that - Chicago has hot summers, and cold winters. We should be used to it. But a lot of people who live *here* go around complaining that it's freezing and wearing winter coats and scarves and all at 10C. And I have to chuckle and wonder, what are they going to do in February?

I think my favorite thing about snow, other than how pretty it looks on the grass and the trees, is throwing snowballs. So long as I don't get hit with too many in return!

try the bloody british (I'm a Yorkshireman, that's different)
they complain it's too hot in summer and want it cooler, then in winter it's too cold and want it hotter

I think everyone but Hawaiians do that.

>>But a lot of people who live *here* go around complaining that it's freezing and wearing winter coats and scarves and all at 10C. And I have to chuckle and wonder, what are they going to do in February?<<

Stay inside as much as possible?



Reminds me of a girl I used to know once, back when I was in the army. She was from Eilat (southmost town in Israel, down in the desert, where the rain average is 32mm a year and temperature in summer can get to 40°C and sometimes even above) who could not stand heat. And she _hated_ it when people would say 'But how can you, you're from Eilat, it's so hot there'... she would explain that yes, it's hot down there, so in summer she stays inside air-conditioned spaces and avoids the heat as much as possible.

I had actually imagined that you lived right on the edge of the desert or something, Lady P. Too many Cecile B. DeMille movies, I guess.

Well, we have more than one desert, is the thing... Jerusalem sits right next to the Judea Desert (and you can actually see it from the neighbourhood where my parents live, it's in one of the pictures I put on Fotki, and I guess that's part of the confusion) - which is a small-ish rain shadow desert under the Judea Mountains.
A little bit further south starts the Negev Desert, which takes up pretty much all of the lower half of Israel, and is actually on the very northern edge of the global desert strip that also includes the Sahara. You can see that quite nicely if you look at a satelite map - you have this huge wide strip stretching from the Sahara east towards Saudi Arabia, and just to the right of the little green triangle signifying the Nile delta you have the Sinai peinisula (still the same desert, basically) and the Negev Desert (again, still basically the same desert). And inside this desert, right at the lowest point of Israel, where it tapers to the Red Sea, you have Eilat. As I said, average rainfal 32mm, average summer temperature somewhere around 40°C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilat#Climate

I'll have to show Faith those photos--she'll be insanely jealous I'll have to show, H, as well--she's from Israel (though I've not asked from where--I can rectify that this evening!) and is the first Israeli woman I've known that doesn't share your first name, Lady P (of course, a sample size of 4 isn't huge...)

Oh, by the way... all those pictures of a snowy Egypt that went around the interwebs last week?... Yeah, not so much.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/egyptsnow.asp

Amy - 3/4 were named Yael, really? Fairly impressive. And yeah, do ask her where she's from. That'll be interesting.

Baron - Those really are incredibly fake photos. Nice.
I've actually not seen them before at all; but I think the real ones were cool enough even without sticking pyramids in there. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/snow-in-cairo-for-first-time-in-over-100-years.html

I didn't have internet available when I was with H tonight, but I *did* tell her about the snow in Jerusalem She's from about 20 miles north of Tel Aviv (that's what she told me--probably assuming I'd never heard of wherever it is--correctly, probably)