Thursday, July 13, 2006

Household Confusion

While the US is officially on the metric system, the transition has been slow at best. Since my husband loves the mathematical simplicity of the metric system, we've been adjusting more and more to using it. His goal is for us to become "biligual" in the two systems, so that one day when the country really does switch, it will be easy for us.

When he was participating in freediving, my husband really got into the land of meters. I know he picked 61 meters as a target, because it was a nice, round 200 feet for our non-metric-speaking acquaintences. That three weeks of diving got me thinking in metric for underwater purposes.

Now he's focused on temperature. He put in a new temperature controller in the house, and configured it in Celsius. So, I'm trying to accept that the house is at 25.5 degrees during the evening, and goes up to 29.5 during the day when we're at work. Since this is just a pair of numbers, I can generally keep that 78 to 85 range in my brain. With our recent stove purchase, he set that up in Celsius, as well. Now I find myself doing math with 32 and 5/9 all the time to convert temperatures in recipes and on packaging in order to input the correct digits on the oven. And now there's a lot more numbers that I have to become bilingual with. So, the adjustment period really starts now. And hopefully at the end, I will be truly temperaturally bilingual.

3 comments:

revjustin said...

Joe must have a LOT of free time if he's worried about being prepared for when the US 'converts' to metric. I can sort of see switching the thermostat, but the stove? I would say that doing all that conversion just to make some poppin-fresh isn't worth it until all the cook-books switch over, too.

Anonymous said...

Kids who deal drugs seem pretty fluent in the metric system. Perhaps the shift will occur on the streets.

Heather said...

Or perhaps you're making a comment about my husband's and my motivations for making the conversion...