It's a bit nippy!

Perhaps the biggest difference between where we currently live in California and our permanent home in the UK is the weather. It's surprisingly easy to get used to predictable, sunny days which reach the middle or high 20s (or low 80s as they'd call it here), and that's what the weather is like here from March to October. It's neither ridiculously hot or ridiculously cold, and best of all, it really is very predictable.

Typical Californian winter attire

As we head into November, we are finally starting to see a change in the weather. It's becoming a little overcast, and no longer quite so warm when the sun comes out in the afternoons. We've found ourselves sitting in the house in evenings saying, "It's a bit nippy!", and that's become something of a catchphrase.

In practice this means we've had to work out how the heating works in our house. In summary, dear reader, it's complicated; it's a warm air heating system, integrated with the air conditioning, with a thermostat (in Fahrenheit, of course), and a set of times and target temperatures. There's no real concept of "on" and "off" - it's a case of setting up temperatures for the whole 24 hour period and hoping the heating will do something sensible.

It's also worth noting that this 114-year-old house is built out of wood. There is almost no brick in the place - there's a brick chimney, but other than that it's just good, sturdy wood. This means it's basically not insulated to any standard we might recognise in the UK. This is pretty normal here: no-one expects a severe winter, and anything in the 30s Fahrenheit would be considered extremely cold. It does get chilly in the mornings, especially when it's clear overnight, but freezing conditions aren't going to happen. The other thing worth noting is that we're quite a bit further South than the UK, so our day length here is longer in the winter - by the time the shortest day rolls around, we'll be having about an hour and a half more daylight than London.

So yes, we're definitely moving into jumper weather here, but that's nothing compared to what we expect to see in the UK when we visit next week. Apropos of that, the blog will be taking a break for a week while we make our first trip back to the UK; we'll be back with the next instalment in a couple of weeks' time, when we'll be able to report on Helen's first choir concert, and what it was like to be tourists in our own country.