De-summer-izing Myself

Florida doesn't have seasons. It has "hurricane season" and "Christmas season" but there's only so much fall and winter you can impose on a place which is called the "Sunshine State." We've given up on fall, but I have a pet theory about Gainesville's winter: we get two weeks of winter spread over "winter" in 2-3 day spurts. That's important, because if you're slow to warm up to the cold, it'll be over by the time you're wearing your coat. People don't really have more than one coat here.

Now that it's past Halloween, I've transitioned to wearing pants. I have two pairs of jeans, and that should last me the month or so in between trips to a washing machine. But now I have to re-calculate.

Look at these rails:


Pretty sweet, you say. I'd like that yellow for my pants, you say. Been there, brushed against that:


I vigorously scrubbed, but I'm not sure if the paint will come off. Don't you have to put signs up in America when there's wet paint?

I also have to improvise when it comes to wearing more than a t-shirt. I've recently gone for the t-shirt scarf look, which I'm not sure is just native to people who've never needed to use a scarf or if this has always existed and we just never progress past it here:


In China I heard the phrase "a scarf is half a sweater." I think it's supposed to be a cute thing to say when your family is cold and all you have is a lousy sweater, but coming out of Gainesville's mini-winters, it's too warm for a real sweater and too cold for nothing. Hence my chic fake Burberry. And that's how I dress in between the rainy season and the not-as-rainy season.