Fw: Texas Facts

[joanne0012]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Amanda" <editor at t...> wrote:
>  You know you're from Texas if:
> > 1. You measure distance in minutes.
> 
> This is true. It's an hour and a half from here to Austin, 30 minutes to
> downtown, four hours to Houston, etc. I can call up the actual mileage if I
> think about it, but we think of it in terms of time.
> 
> > 2. You've ever had to switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day.
> 
> There are whole months we have to do this, on both ends of summer.

Amanda, thanks SO much for the laughs.  But I must inform you that numbers 1 
and 2, above, are also true in Massachusetts.  I never realized that we Yankees 
had so much in common with folks from Texas!

I suspect that our reason for giving distances in time is different from yours -- I 
assume that in Texas, you're talking mostly about highway miles.  Here in the 
Boston area, we give distances in time because mileage would be misleading in 
the areas where traffic is so congested that it's often faster to walk or to take 
a roundabout route that's much longer in miles but shorter in time.  As in, "It's 
two hours from Milton to Somerville if you go straight up Route 93, through the 
Big Dig, but 45 minutes if you go around the city on Route 128."

Regarding No. 2, just in the past month we've had 43 degrees and 93 degrees in  
one day.