A tad chilly

Yeah, once it's down to temperatures that are actually damaging or dangerous, there's not much difference in sensation, though it still makes a difference how long it takes to get uncomfortable even with good garments.  Or how long to warm up.  I've had some cold days where by the time the interior of the car started to improve, I felt like I was shaking hard enough to bounce the car.  Still, any day the car starts is a good day . . . 

Oh crap when I finish my work today at 8am and I came out of the building, the heat really hit me, is must be something like 30C already, man is gonna be a scorcher today and what's worse is that the humidty is pretty high, something like 80% .......................*getting a cold beer out of the fridge *.......

  My coldest was a couple of days of -30* in Great Falls Mt.  It made 0 degrees seem downright balmy in comparison.  I always found the Chinook winds interesting in that it just felt so unaturally out of place to me.  I'm also beginning to better understand the migration of the sunbirds too.

 You rat!    

and that's not all we are getting a tropical Cyclone 'Bianca' warning which is coming down our way and down to to the south west might get the worse of it by Sunday.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/8732433/cyclone-threat-to-south-west/

edit....*getting another cold beer out*.......*crack*........"aahhh that's better"   

+30 C keeps me inside just as much as (-30) C.  The only difference is I don't have to worry about my car not starting.  I hate heat!  On the other hand, I've always thought it would be fun to be in a hurricane/cyclone, as long as I didn't own any property nearby.

Way back in 1987 I was in Hawaii for a couple weeks.  Great visit, lots of fun places to see, but most of the time I was very uncomfortable with the heat and humidity.  The only place that felt reasonable was the summit of Mauna Kea. 

I find Hawaii entirely manageable.  I've been a couple of places though, one in particular, where the heat and humidity were absolutely unbearable.  Suprisingly, one of them was Montreal.

Been nice here this week, by the way, up to +13° C this week (due to the aforementioned chinook).  Today it gets cold again.

"chinook" ? are they keeping you cold ? well if so tell them to bugger off.

Hawaii doesn't get a whole lot of seasonal variation, but it's there.  I was there in June, when the average high temp is 87 F , compared to an average high of 80 F in January, so that made some difference.  Those few degrees cross over the point where I start to melt down.  

Unrelated Hawaii story here.  The worst day for heat was when I hopped off a bus and decided to climb up to the rim of Diamond Head from the outside and then descend down through the normal park route (which starts from inside the crater and ends at the summit).  Problem was, I hadn't looked at the map enough and I went up onto the rim almost exactly 180 degrees around the rim from the actual summit, and the point where I crested the rim was uncomfortably close to restricted areas that contained a lot of military antennas.  Worse, I still had about 3/4 of a mile to hike around the rim to get to the actual summit and the official trail down.  It was slow going, and there is some really neat knife-edge and vertical exposure along the way.  The photo below shows about a 300 foot interval of part of the knife edge I hiked along, but it makes the vertical relief look less steep and impressive than it really is.

Right at the top of the official park trail there was a guy who had lugged up a cooler of pop and sold cans (at extremely high prices) to thirsty hikers as they reached the summit.  He'd been there since early morning and had seen everyone come up, since there's only one trail.  I remember how his eyes bugged out when he saw me stumble around the corner of a rock as I'd finally made my way to the real trail at the summit and he asked "How the hell did you get up here?"  I declined his offer of a $10 Coke and descended down through the old World War II tunnels on the offcial trail.

Oh yeah, the temperature?  That's what got me started on this yarn.  When I got back to our hotel, all sunburned and windburned from being exposed on the crater rim, I learned that the temperature had reached 91 F that afternoon and set a new daily record high for Honolulu.

OK, someone else's turn for a heat or cold story.

What time is sun set approximately, on the first day of summer, and winter in Michigan?

At my location

Winter solstice:
sunrise ~8:15am standard time
sunset ~4:55pm 

Summer solstice:
sunrise ~5:45am daylight savings time
sunset ~9:30pm 

I'll give it a try, Cystem.  I'd like to preface the story by saying cold and snow don't really bother me much.  What really sucks about northern winters is the lack of sunshine, but living in Michigan, it's not hard to forget what the sun looks like.

My worst experience with the cold was in '08.  I was working in Illinois--the work had to be done outside and it involved a lot of wiring and other fine hand work--in December.  For those of you who have never been to Northern Illinois:  there is no cover.  They hate trees in those parts and cut them all down long ago, and it's flat as a pancake.  One day it was in the teens and raining!  Talk about miserable.  I'd lose all feeling in my hands after about fifteen minutes, then have to sit in the truck for five minutes before being able to continue.  Talk about dreading getting out of the vehicle.  I took a photograph of one of those bank thermometer/clocks where you could see water dripping off of it and the temperature read 17F.  I took the photo because I knew what I would say if someone told me it was raining at 17F.  Wish I could find it, but I've changed 'puters since then and I don't think it made the transfer.  Incidentally, it was on that trip that I discovered chess.com.

 I didn't think summer solstice sunset would be that late.

Yeah, but remember that Michigan is at the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, and should really be assigned to the Central Time Zone.  Over at the east edge of the time zone at the same latitude (in Maine) sunset is more than an hour earlier.

There is a pretty significant area of Michigan that does lie in the Central Time Zone.  Living on the western edge of a time zone is awesome!

Only 4 counties at the western end of the U.P. are on Central Time.  The story I've heard is that back in the late 1800's when time zone boundaries were first being established, the Keweenaw copper mines were important enough to the economy that there was supposed to have been some benefit to keeping their offices operating on the same time zone as the stock exchanges in New York, and that was why Michigan didn't end up in the Central Time zone like it should have been based on geography.

Great story!  So those copper barons did future Michiganders a great service.  We should build a copper statue or something.  I suggest a lady holding a torch wearing a funky hat.  We could erect it in Copper Harbor.

Of course, being in the Eastern Zone also gets us sunrises as late as 8:20 a.m. in the winter.  I remember lots of years standing out by the road in the cold and pitch black darkness waiting for the school bus.