This summer has been the coldest summer since I remember. It may sound like a surprise to you. After all, no one would say Portland is a cold place especially during summer. After 8 month of rains, people really love to enjoy the summer weather in Portland. However, it actually happened to me that the summer is quite cold.
The unexpected long raining season is the first reason of a cold summer. Everyone in Oregon who realized that I just moved here last Sept told me that the rain will stop once June comes. Oh, how they were wrong. This summer it rained till July. I was cold everyday in June hoping that summer would come soon. Finally by July, the rain sort of stopped. I was excited. Finally summer has arrived in Portland! But my feeling of being cold did not go away.
The busy schedule at work made summer a cold one. Right after July 4th, I became quite busy. I stayed in the lab from July 11th on till the end of July. Everyday I would go to work early and come home quite late. The first week of July 11th, several days I did not get to home till 10 pm. So all I see was lab, work, and a bit sky outside the lab. The worst part of the whole thing was that where I sit in the lab was really cold. Since there are servers in the lab, the lab is made exceptionally cold to cool down the servers. For me, it was like winter. Everyday I had three layers of clothes on. How can summer be any colder than this?
Summer time should a great time to bike, unless you are only biking at early morning and later of the evening. This summer my parents came over to help me out to take care of the kids. They stayed between July to first week of August. It had make such a difference to me, since I was really busy at work. My parents needed the car to drop and pick up the kids, I ended up not have a car to drive. You may be wondering what about the truck. Well, let's not talk about that here. So, like many Oregonians do in the summer, I picked up my bike and started bike to and from work everyday. I don't have a very good bike. As matter of fact, every person who was biking on the road passed me while I was biking to and from work. This is when I experience the cold summer. Every morning, before I got on my bike, I was already feeling the cold wind. I don't recall any day that I did not have my bike jacket on before biking. Since I did not come home early. I biked home late as well. After more than one month of biking. I did not even get any sun tan. I am still very pale skinned. Lucky me, at least, I don't have to worry about skin cancer.
The truth is that Portland summer is a bit like Kunming, where I was born. Kunming was called Spring City of China, because it was never too hot, never very cold. I remember that when I was a little girl, I wanted to wear skirt during summer. But the weather was too cold for it. My parents always made sure I had long pants under the skirt. Now I am in Portland. I stared at my skirts in my closet the whole summer. I really never had a chance to ware them. I saw at work many women put skirts on. I have to admire their ability to handle the "cool weather". The other day I was looking at my kids' shorts. After we moved here, Justin wanted me to get rid of his shorts. He claimed that he would not need them any more. I thought well they would still wear them during summer. My kids never did the whole summer. Of course, there are people all over the place wearing summer clothes. It reminded me back in Alaska, when the weather was 32F, you would see some students put shorts on. Everything is relative. Remember we came from Sacramento, a place that reaches over 100 F many days per summer. How can you compare that with Portland?
Don't give me wrong. My kids actually got sun burn this summer. Justin got really bad sun burn. He was in lots of pain. It took him days and one layer of skin on his back to feel better. I hope that he will never forget this. The fact is that if you are in Portland during summer, you have to be outside the door to get that sun shining on you. A person like me is the reason of being cold all the time. You wonder after 5 weeks of biking how I felt? Biking does not give me the soreness like boot camp. boot camp is still number one on the exercise list.
