A wireless weather station is one of those gadgets that people typically buy for each other at Christmas but which no one really needs or wants. We’re an exception, though. We bought one for ourselves and we like it. We’ve even come to depend on it. For example, how else would we know when a summer night was cool enough to run the fan instead of the AC? Stepping outside would give us a general idea of the temperature, but just because it feels cool doesn’t mean that it’s actually cold enough to beat the heat that builds up on the second floor of our house. Thanks to the weather station, we know for sure.
A few months ago, the weather station’s batteries started running low. We knew that as soon as they died or were removed, all of the information contained in the weather station’s memory would be gone. We were unhappy about that, because our “extremes” were about to disappear. They were…
Low: -2.7°
High: 101.2°
Wow! In the time between moving into the house and the batteries’ death, we experienced a range of over 100 degrees of temperature.
But why did we care? I can’t speak for my husband, but for me the extremes showed that our house had protected us from freezing cold and broiling heat. Silly as it sounds, it gave me a feeling of safety to know that. I didn’t need to fear any temperature between those two extremes. I had already experienced it and survived, and the extremes displayed on the weather station were the proof.
Luckily, there are all kinds of memory. This blog is a form of memory and now I’m storing those extremes here in this post. Meanwhile, our weather station is still collecting data. With the old extremes recorded here, I can look forward to new ones. How much temperature variation will we experience this year? Our low is already almost unimaginably low (-16.9°). Will summer bring us temps above 101.2°? We’ll see!