Reminds me that one of our local TV meteorologists has spoken several time of "meteorological seasons." Apparently for whatever reason, meteorologists think of seasons by the calendar months. Winter is December, January, and February,;spring is March, April, and May; summer is June, July, and August; and fall is September, October, and November.
I think most people do. If the weather has been warm or hot, flowers are blooming, garden vegetables producing, they've been to the beach, etc., they don't, on June 21, say, "Ah, summer is here at last!" and they don't say "finally, fall has begun!" if they've been crunching through red and gold leaves for the past few weeks.
In New Orleans, it's summery hot through September and trees don't turn colors or lose their leaves, so I guess there the 23rd makes a little more sense.
That is what is officially accepted here, newspaper and TV news will say on June 1. "Today is the first day of winter." In fact this year there was a lot of comment about Winter coming right on time. May 30 was max temp 15'C and I do not think there had been a day when it did not reach 14'C through all of May. Then on May 31 the max was 9'C and June 1st, max 7'C.
In your post, I had to stop and translate each of the temps into F, then would get thrown by the upside-down seasons. When I saw you say May was in the 60s I thought, brrr, that IS cold for May, but then of course I realized you were saying it was WARM for May and had to remind myself that your May is the opposite of my May.
It must have been hard to teach natural science if you had to constantly go through all of those calculations!
Our winter started extremely late, too. In December and January it was above 0'C most days. It would dip below 0'C at night, so lakes froze to a heavy but clear ice, easily thick enough to hold a person in most places, smooth on top because it would melt and refreeze every day. So people were ice skating like crazy. People who hadn't skated in years were buying or renting skates and lacing them on. On one big lake near here that has multiple cities on its shores, they were ice skating across the lake for lunch or a beer or to go to a movie!
Then at the very end of January the temperature plunged well into the double-digit below 0'C. One day the
high was minus 25'C. And in February, the snowfall not only broke the all time record -- it broke the record by more than a third of a meter. So the whole winter was weird.
I wrote a few weather stories for the newspaper so I talked to meteorologists a lot. One said our winters are warming much faster than our summers. By about half a degree C a decade, which didn't sound too drastic to me -- and if anything it's welcome since I hate cold weather -- but apparently it's actually pretty dire and catastrophic.
"In my day," the schools in the region where I grew up did not open until after Labor Day (first Monday in September in the U.S.), sometimes the very next day.
In my day, too. I guess originally it had something to do with the planting season, having kids home to help with the farm, but even that seems odd because harvesting goes well into September.
Then for a while I suppose it was because schools lacked air conditioning, and also that waiting until after the holiday helped protect resorts and tourism -- obviously lots of families liked taking trips around Labor Day (first Monday in September, Brian) to get the extra day off. So for a long time the state required schools to wait until after the holiday. Then at some point that law was lifted and schools started opening the week before Labor Day or even into late August, which I find abhorrent. The classrooms are still hot because many schools still don't have AC. The start of school is also a really strong cultural/psychological signal of the beginning of fall. Let's not make fall come any earlier than it has to, Legislature.
