Metric Mayhem

On January 1st of this year, I threw my hat into the New Years Resolution ring with a high-minded, well-intentioned and - if you believe my Wife, friends, family, coworkers, and virtually everyone else I know - utterly laughable resolution to use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.

My original intent was to try to embrace the metric system, but in baby steps.  After all, there's an awful lot of shit to measure in life, and I wanted to test the waters with something relatively simple and non-invasive, like the temperature.  Lengths are a pain in the ass - driving somewhere between 2 and 5 kilometers to the convenience store to buy beer, only to be robbed by a gunman that I could only describe to the police as "between 1 and 2 meters tall" seemed like it was just going to make my life really, really difficult. And learning that I was tipping the scales at 80 kilograms made me paranoid that my family would stage an intervention for my apparent anorexia.

So I went with the temperature.  It seemed simple enough - F minus 32, divided by not-quite-2.  Or C times almost 2 plus 32.  See? Simple! I also tried drilling myself with the basics: 0 is freezing. 10 is jacket weather. 20 is a nice Wisconsin day. 30 is pretty warm. 40 is freakin' hot. 50 is your standard Phoenix summer day.

After six months, I feel pretty comfortable with it... except for every other person I come in contact with.  My Better Half, for instance, decided right off that my metric experiment was the first sign of early onset dementia, and basically demanded that I only speak to her in "human temperatures".  I think she's currently plotting to get me a metric calendar for my birthday. My coworkers seem to similarly dismiss my weather reports as yet another sign of my certifiability.

But I'm going to stick to my guns - until the end of the year or until someone beats me with a 4.5kg sack of potatoes.