Seasons
When I finally experienced real winter, the upper-Midwestern winter that I dreaded, it made me depressed. Every aspect of my Minnesota life was built around avoiding and accommodating the awful cold. Imagine my joy at leaving Minnesota at the end of August, before the cold could set in. We spent September in Nebraska and Oklahoma, enjoying the end of the summer. We flew to Australia and landed in the springtime. People said summer would be brutal here, but I'm not sure why. We have one wall-mounted air conditioner in our house. Most days, we don't run it. Instead, we open the windows. On hot days, we go to the beach. The wind kicks up every afternoon around 2 or 3 p.m., like clockwork, and cools the place down. It's never very humid, which means the temperature drops off precipitously around sunset. I will grant that the sun can be brutal, in the middle of the day, but in general the climate here has been lovely so far. Today is March 1, which is accounted the first d...