Wednesday, October 01, 2003

The First Chill

It's October 1 and when I got up to let the dog out this morning it was 39 degrees. I'm talking farenheit, not celsiuis. It's been a long time since I've spent days like this here. I always left NH at the end of September and jumped back into another month of what I'd consider summer in Japan. It doesn't start to get seriously chilly in Otsu until November or December. And at worst it gets to around freezing. But with no central heat, "just" around freezing is pretty damn cold.
New Hampshire has serious winters. It's beautiful here now. The leaves are turning and falling and people decorate around their homes with dried corn stalks, bales of straw (use it to mulch the garden later), pumpkins and big baskets of mums. I look out the window and see squirrels scampering among the fallen leaves. It's just so picturesque and Norman Rockewellian.
Winter is a beast I haven't really confronted since I left Colorado in 1987. Western Japan has relatively mild winters and Hawaii's winter was always just fine by me.
It's been my suspicion for some time that a "relatively mild" winter without central heating is less comfortable than a harsh winter with a heated abode. Guess I'm going to get to test my hypothesis from here on out.

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