Weather woes

So Facebook tells me that there is a bit of a heatwave in the Midwest.  Welcome to my world.

Coming from a place that truly has four seasons, it is the birthright of Midwesterners to complain about the weather. Winters are wiled away dreaming of swimming pools, fireflies and the scent freshly mown grass.  Come summer you yearn for that nip of crisp autumn air, hot chocolate and the first big snow.  Then there is March, everyone hates March.

I have now been 'seasonless' for 7 years.  After five years in the UK (four in Scotland and one in England) I can say with confidence that the tales about bad British weather - are not nearly dramatic enough.  It's awful.  I had been to the UK twice before I moved there, but only for a total of a few months time - not long enough to grasp how truly miserable it really is.

Don't get my wrong, I am an Anglophile through and through.  I love the UK.  In many ways it offers a much higher standard of living than the US (excellent healthcare, 39 weeks statutory maternity leave, and 28 days minimum paid vacation), the food is far better than its reputation allows, they have fine ales, the people are generally charming (hell, I married one of them) and it's full to bursting with history, culture and diversity.

But, there is the weather.

The Scottish tourism board says it rains 250 days a year (yeah right, more like 350).  On the rare occasion it's not raining there are the days where it so grey and/or so windy as to make no difference.  It never gets warm enough to wear shorts, the North Sea (on the east coast where I lived) remains dangerously cold year round and in the winter it is pitch black by 4:00pm.  On a nice day there is potentially nowhere nicer on the planet, Scotland is gorgeous, but you might only get 10 days like that in a year.

England is only marginally better.  It doesn't get dark quite so early and you might be able to justify breaking out a pair of shorts once or twice in a year, but the seasons don't really change - British weather is really one long extended spring followed by a long extended winter.  On the rare occasion the weather does change - panic and chaos ensue.

Two years ago at Christmas the UK had a cold snap.  My husband was in the air - en route to London from Malaysia when the snow started falling.  I lost him for two entire days.  Heathrow was closed, the other UK airports were either closed or didn't have runways big enough to cope with an A380 (the Airbus jumbo-jet that carries 500+ passengers).  They eventually landed in Paris, the airline tried to send him back to their base in Dubai.  After 5 hours of queuing he finally managed to get Eurostar tickets and a train to London.  After 56 hours of travel, he finally managed to call me in Chicago to let me know he was alive and that Don Quixote had nothing on him. Meanwhile, this is how Heathrow was dealing with the snow:

So when we decided to move to Malaysia the weather was potentially the single thing about which we were most excited.  Just a couple hundred miles from the equator, the weather here really does never change.  The amount of rain varies a bit throughout the year, but the temperature generally peaks at between 93-97 degrees everyday, it rarely dips below 80 even at night and the humidity is always high.

When we first got here the novelty of the hot weather was such that we spent every moment we could outside.  Now we've gone a bit native and generally agree that it's too hot to go outside.  Don't get me wrong, I love the weather here - and maintaining a wardrobe for just one season is brilliant - but it's amazing how quickly you take things for granted.  In no time my Midwest roots will get the better of me and I too will be yearning for cold and snow.

So, a bit of free advice - enjoy this heatwave while it lasts.