I'll finally see a summer breeze blow away a winter storm

A moment I forgot from the tour of Fort Sumter: afterwards we drove back to the medical center because, as I'd wondered, my father had driven his own Jeep there, and we had just picked him up. (Well, my mother might have driven him to his appointment and then driven home, after all.) As we were driving off he ran us down because he'd left his jacket in our car, and his keys and iPhone in his jacket, and you can see where rather a hassle was narrowly averted.

A jacket was a good idea to have going to Fort Sumter, because it's in the harbor and between the water and the winds it's appreciably cooler there than on the land. On Wednesday, when we would've gone home if not for the airplane hassles getting us there, a jacket was more than just a good idea because the temperature was dropping. For all the gloating my parents were giving about the warmth of Charleston, it was a day not likely to get out of the 40s, and they were forecasting it to drop below freezing overnight. A homeless guy we encountered while downtown begged for help pointing out that it was going to be in the 20s tonight, and bunny_hugger noted to me that back home, yeah, getting down into the 20s is not a particularly savagely cold thing to experience in January.

My mother was willing to admit that yes, dropping below freezing does undercut the premise that it never gets cold in South Carolina, but she did insist on pointing out that it would get back to the 50s or so by the weekend, and my father helpfully pulled up the temperature for Lansing to do what can't have been intended to rile bunny_hugger nearly so much. Since I spent half a decade living in a place where the coldest recorded temperature is 67 degrees Fahrenheit, and I don't think I ever saw it below about 75, I didn't feel like I could say much about what temperature it ought to be over January.

Where the weather issue really got ridiculous was in the evening when we saw that schools were delaying or cancelling classes for the next day on the grounds of the bitter cold. Again, that's temperatures projected to be in the high 20s. I could dimly remember having one or two days of school cancelled for bitter cold when I grew up, but that was temperatures below zero Fahrenheit, and that only happened the one winter. Some of bunny_hugger's classes were cancelled for cold last year, but that was the first time she'd ever heard of that happening, and that was when the nitrogen liquefied out of the atmosphere. Charleston was facing weather you have to wear a moderate jacket for. bunny_hugger is still shaking her head over this.

Trivia: In 1910 New York City mayor William Gaynor prohibited the police from entering licensed liquor-selling premises or speaking with their owners. Plain-clothes detectives might enter premises that kept a rear door open, but were prohibited from making arrests on the spot. The plan worked surprisingly well in cutting saloon-paid graft. Source: Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Corruption, and New York's Trial of the Century, Mike Dash.

Currently Reading: A Brief Guide To Oz: 75 Years Going Over The Rainbow, Paul Simpson.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 24, 2015: Many, But Not Complicated Edition, as there were a lot of mathematics topics discussed but none of them require too much depth to review. Fifth of these since the last roundup, or you can just follow the Livejournal Syndicate feed, or the raw RSS feed it started from.