To Heat or Not to Heat

I’m someone who wants to hold on to summer as long as possible. And we’ve reached a point in the year when it can be hard to do. My normal summer wear is shorts and putting them away to wear long pants all day is a sign of capitulation to the upcoming cold. To be clear, I don’t wear shorts for dance lessons because dress socks and shorts is not a look that can easily be pulled off.

The last couple of days, we’ve had abundant sunshine and temperatures topping off in the low 70’s. That’s not truly summer like but with the sun, the shorts are still appropriate. But the days don’t start off in the 70’s and they’ve dipped into the 40’s and that is far outside of summer territory.

And that creates a dilemma if you need to go out anytime before it really warms up. Do you go with the shorts and just deal with the briskness or start with pants just for the comfort? To me, changing clothes in the middle of the day seems silly (well except that I do change before going to dance lessons but that’s for a specific reason). Plus, I’ve found my legs don’t really get as cold as other parts of me. Not sure why but it is what it is. So I can rock the jacket and shorts combo for the chilly mornings.

Yes it might look a bit strange because you are covering your arms but not your legs but I don’t care. Anything to hold on to illusion of summer just a bit longer.

I have a similar issue with the heater. Turning it on is like surrendering to the cold which will happen soon enough. Plus, it is hard to accept turning on artificial heat when the day time temperature is going to be higher than where we set the heat.

But it is those pesky cold nights that are the problem. Turn off the heat and you can wake up to a house that is a bit colder than I’d like. I mean it isn’t really cold because if I were outside in the sun at the same temperature, it would be fine. Just something about the house that just feels colder if that makes any sense. Plus, my wife doesn’t deal with the cold particularly well.

At least the heating is designed to be turned off and on at will so I can just warm things up in the morning and then let the sun take over in the afternoon.

The long range forecast does hint that we are going to have a few days where the shorts will have to go away and the heat may need to remain on. Until then, I’ll keep up the illusion that we still have a lot of warm days left even as the leaves change color and drop to remind me that we really don’t.