Choose your misery.

[WOM]

Given the recent extreme opposites in weather:

If you had to choose, would you rather endure the -23 or whatever in North America, or the 44++ in Australia?

Me, I think I'd fare better in the cold.

[Reed John]

Choose your misery.

The cold. Always the cold. I can always add more layers.

Extreme heat bothers me the moment I step into it. It makes me irritable and depressed. I don't mind the cold so much on an emotional/visceral level. It only becomes a problem when I start to lose feeling in my extremities. That's inconvenient, and then it becomes a bit worrisome.

[Cal Alamein]

Choose your misery.

Three for the cold.

Lived many yrs. in rural Alaska and just about as many in Oklahoma. I'll take an Alaskan Jan and Feb vs. July and August in Oklahoma.

Central New Mexico can easily get to triple digits, but the mornings are always nice and it does cool off enough to be tolerable at night.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Choose your misery.

Probably the cold, but it really depends on the windchill.

I've been in some very cold places with still air and it's been fine. On the other hand, I've been in some moderately cold places with a facing wind and it's been awful.

[Cal Alamein]

Choose your misery.

Too true. There is no weather worse than extreme cold with gusty winds.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Choose your misery.

Cold. Every time. Heat makes me uncomfortable, itchy, and an unseemly shade of angry pink.

[Reed John]

Choose your misery.

My second Soul Asylum earworm of the day

[San Bernardhinault]

Choose your misery.

I'll be the first to vote for the toasty-hot, on a couple of conditions: (1) That it's desert toasty hot, not vile, humid toasty hot. Which also means cooler nights. (2) Also, I'm allowed sufficient air-con to get the house down to something vaguely bearable.

[evilC]

Choose your misery.

Yeah - cold for me, too.

I'm a sweaty betty, but there is only so much good, cooling-wise, that sweat can do. To me, high temperatures feel like being held underwater in a bath that is too hot.

[Third rate Leszno]

Choose your misery.

Cold. As I head towards 50 I feel it a bit now, but I really don't enjoy sweaty, hot conditions half as much as a bitterly cold winters day.

[hobbes]

Choose your misery.

Hot hot hot.
You can lay about in the hot and drink beer and read a book.
Cold just makes me want to cry. And then the tears freeze on my face.
I hate it when it gets below 5C.
I would love to live somewhere Spanish where it never gets below 10 or 15C.

[via vicaria]

Choose your misery.

Cold please. Was in Melbourne this week, suffering through the 40's, and it was no fun at all. It was mildly better up in Bendigo as it was drier, but you couldn't be out in it long.

I've been through temperatures down to about -20 before and while I wasn't loving it, it was infinitely preferable to the heat.

[evilC]

Choose your misery.

hobbes wrote: Hot hot hot.
You can lay about in the hot a day drink beer and read a book.
Cold just makes me want to cry. And then the tears freeze on my face.
I hate it when it gets below 5C.
I would love to live somewhere Spanish where it never gets below 10 or 15C.

I wonder how long a cold Stella stays cold in 44^o heat? Warm Stella. Urgh!

[Bored Of Education]

Choose your misery.

You know what? I just wonder why the fuck people live in such places. I know that a lot of the Australians' ancestors didn't have the choice but, every time I go to Florida and you walk from an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned house, it suggests that the world is telling you not to live there.

On the other hand, I doubt that anyone in the -23 places has those fucking outdoor heaters. That heat the outside. Literally, heating up outdoors. They probably stay inside. With heating indoors.

I will probably go with -23. The worst place I have ever been to is Turkey where it was so hot that our room (I say 'room', it was a cross between a shed and a sauna) waslike a greenhouse, the sea was like a bath and the breeze was like a hairdryer. We didn't move from our 'chalet' for two days and realised that it was because our bodies were telling us to get the fuck down and not move.

However, I have been able to walk around the coldest of places - Copenhagen, Hungary, Glasow - in winter and drank in them. Cold wins.

[alyxandr]

Choose your misery.

Our ancestors wouldn't have chosen cold, which can kill you in minutes, as opposed to hot which takes a few days. But cold for me too, yeah.

[Bored Of Education]

Choose your misery.

It isn't "Choose your ancestors' misery" though. My Grandad was on the Russian convoys in WWII. He'd probably tell me to think myself bloody lucky.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Choose your misery.

OK, 44C and -23C (=111F and -9F) are both unpleasant, not to mention life-threatening in the wrong context. But the choic depends on numerous factors which can mitigate or exacerbate in each case:

- the humidity in the "hot" case
- the quality of winter clothing in the "cold" case
- how long you have to be outdoors for (in the "cold" case)
- how active you have to be (in the "hot" case: hot weather is generally a lot more appealing if you can lie around relaxing than if you have to work)
- whether you have an air-conned escape place in the "hot" case.

At the most fundamental, as has already been said, great extremes of cold can be combatted with wrapping up to keep your body heat. There's no escape from extreme (i.e. > body temp) heat in some circumstances and it kills.

But make the surrounding circs a bit more supportive (especially the "not having to work" bit) and I'll take the heat any day. That probably goes for most English people, because there are only about 10 to 20 days a year in England when you might reasonably complain about it being too warm, whereas most of the year it's too chilly to sit still outside without a coat, which is a bit limiting. Count me as another one who would love the Spanish life, taking my meals in a patio courtyard half the year as the sun warms the whitewashed walls of my home....

[beak]

Choose your misery.

It's generally way easier and more comfortable presuming modern convenience - to warm yourself up when cold than vice versa.

[Femme Folle]

Choose your misery.

Cold for me too. Heat makes me feel sick and grumpy. No one likes that.

[linus]

Choose your misery.

Other than WOM, I'm not sure if anyone on here really has experienced bitter cold conditions, days or weeks on end with lows in the mid to high -20Cs, with a nice breeze thrown in for good measure. I'd take the heat without any question, if it's 45C in the afternoon, it will drop to the mid-20s or low 30s at night, you can sleep in in the afternoon or lie by the pool with an tall glass of ice cold juice cocktail.

There is a way to weather a long cold winter season, it really helps if you can live part of it in the country with access to skiing and snowshoeing, you can enjoy going out when it's not brutally cold (above -15C is OK) and it's nice to come in in the evening and enjoy a warm hearty meal in good company by the fireplace.

One mitigating factor for the cold: the weather has noticeably changed the last couple of decades, and cold winters (like this one) no longer happen every year in eastern Canada, while warmer or more temperate places are getting hotter every year.

[Cal Alamein]

Choose your misery.

When I wrote upthread that I lived in rural Alaska, specifically that was the Bering Strait and North Slope regions, so I've experienced -55 F temps as well as wind chills reaching -90 F. Absolutely no way would I want to suffer through more than a couple of weeks of that and certainly not without a warm apartment nearby. Our first Christmas on the Slope we went two weeks without a plane due to temps below -35 F and unrelenting ground fog. Very frustrating.

But what you say about eastern Canada is also true about Alaska and especially the far north - temps are definitely warmer and it is playing havoc with those who rely on a mostly subsistence way of life.

I'll still take the not-so-extreme cold temps. Sorry to not be too handy w/ the F to C conversion, but a summer high of 110 F in Oklahoma 'cools' down to low 90s in the evening. Godawful.

[Femme Folle]

Choose your misery.

Once you get that cold, you don't have to convert it.

[linus]

Choose your misery.

What were you doing up there Cal?

[Cal Alamein]

Choose your misery.

My wife and I were teachers for the NSBSD and BSSD.

http://www.nsbsd.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1
http://www.bssd.org/

We were very fortunate that we got to travel and spend a couple of weeks in just about every village in each of those massive districts.

[Incandenza]

Choose your misery.

So all of this shit I hear from non-West Coasters about us being soft because we can't handle the cold, a lot of you can't take extreme heat? A bit ironic.