Are you under the weather?

[Alan]

Hi,

Does the weather affect you? Are you more relaxed when the sun is belting down on you and are you depressed when the rain never stops?

I'd like to know whether you have any views on this.

Alan
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[Tamara]

Hi, Alan

I think that it (also) depends on the area, where you had grown up as a child.
I was born in a very sunny and warm place and had lived there till the age of 7. All my further life I have been living in moderate climate - and suffer [from?] lack of sunlight, whereas my husband who belongs to the north of Russia is quite happy with a cold (for me ) and cloudy weather with not very much sun. He really likes walking in the rain and enjoys travelling to Scotland in early spring
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[Jamie (K)]

Where I live, a warm sunny July day can burn you red as a lobster in about half an hour, so you're happy for a nice day, but at the same time you're careful. Besides this, hot days are also very humid here, and they can either make you lose all your energy or give you a lot of energy, depending on what you have to do.

I like cool, dark, foggy days, because those are the best days for thinking and meditating. Colors seem more intense to me on those days.

We have very loud thunderstorms in the summer, and it's beautiful to sit on the porch and watch them move in from the west. Tornado weather is a bit scary, though.

[Jan]

[Torsten]

Jan, as far as I know you are the first (and so far only) english-test.net community member who access our site from a ship. That's quite exciting when you think about it. I guess you do that through a satellite connection?

What about your weather and climate experiences when you go ashore? I mean, in what part of the world would you like to say for a longer period of time? I want to be able to live and work in different countries during different times of the year. Here in Leipzig the autumn and winter are quite dark, wet and rather gloomy. That's why, during the winter, I want to be able to move to places with more snow and frost whenever I want. I want to be able to travel wherever I want whenever I want....
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[Jan]

[Yankee]

Hi Alan

The weather definitely has some effect on me, but I'd say the length of the day often has more effect than the weather itself. The short days in the dead of winter do tend to make me a liitle bit blue. On the other hand, I love gazing at a fresh blanket of snow. That can be extraordinarily beautiful and I find it impossible to be blue when gazing at it.

We had a particularly long, extremely cold winter this year. This spring everything started blooming much later than usual, and then all at once. Nothing particularly gradual about it. And what that meant for me was unusually bad hay fever this spring.

I don't mind rainy weather. In fact, I often enjoy it. It just shouldn't be dark, dreary and wet for weeks on end. I love a good thunder storm and even hail storms can be exciting. The problem is, hail storms can also cause significant damage. Last year we had a humdinger of a hail storm at the end of July. Hail stones the size of baseballs. The hail did all kinds of damage to cars, windows, stucco on houses, etc. There was also some localized flooding because it all came down so fast and furiously.

I've also experienced hurricanes. I often enjoy them! Since hurricanes typically hit land in the southern part of the US before moving northward, they have usually lost quite a bit of their steam by the time they reach the northeastern states (where I'm from). They still can cause a lot of flooding and damage, but it's usually nothing like what often happens in the south. I've also experienced the "tornado season weather" of the midwest that Jamie mentioned. But, never an actual tornado, thank goodness. Although those kinds of storms can be scary and dangerous, still there's something exiting about them at the same time.

Ultimately, the kind of weather that I dislike the most is hot, humid windless weather. And the eastern half of the US typically sees lots of that in the summer. That's one thing I love about German weather. The humidity in the summer is MUCH lower. In fact, it's so low, I perceive it as "no humidity at all." Whenever one of my German friends complains about an unusually humid day here, my own perception is that it's not humid at all.

Amy
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Amy
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ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[Jamie (K)]

[Yankee]

Hi Jamie

By "German weather" I mean the type of weather I have experienced in southern Germany. When I came to Germany I expected the winters to be much harsher and I also expected much more snow than what I was accostomed to in the CT, NY, NJ areas. After all, the latitude here is much further north. But I've found the opposite to be true. The summers in southern Germany are not nearly as hot and, for me, are also not at all humid and the winters are not nearly as extreme (i.e.: usually not as cold, much less snow). But there do seem to be fewer sunny days in the summer (although that's just feeling --- I've never actually researched it).

Amy
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Amy
.
ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[Conchita]

Hot, humid weather can wipe me out and is definitely not worth the sweat for me. Having experienced both Montreal and Beirut (though you get a bit of a sea breeze in the second) in August, I’d choose another month to visit these otherwise beautiful cities.

Madrid can be suffocating, too, but it has a dry climate. Temperatures of 30 to 35?C here are far more bearable than, say, 10 degrees Celsius less in humid places.

All the same, many of us are still desperate to flee from it in summer and think the only decent time of day to live here is at night!

PS: Another funny expression I've just learnt:
brass monkey weather UK INFORMAL
extremely cold weather

Now I wonder where that comes from !

[Yankee]

[Jan]

[Conchita]

Thank you, Jan, for the full phrase -- it's even better than its shortened form. Now, that I'm fairly sure I'd heard before. I just hadn't made the connection with 'brass monkey weather'!

Here's what I've found about the origin of the expression:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bra1.htm