This weekend was a warm and unseasonably hot one for the greater Vancouver area. In fact, the temperatures broke records for several places as some residents had to deal with heat that approached 30 degrees. We’re not even in the middle of May and it felt like summer already. I was outside on Saturday and it didn’t take me long to sweat.
Normally, I wouldn’t complain about such good weather but we live in unique times right now. For the most part, we’re still living under some form of quarantine conditions. When my own quarantine started in mid-March, the weather was still quite cool, cold even. If you stepped outside, you needed a jacket for sure. Jackets have sleeves and in those heady and chaotic first days of the quarantine, it was easy to shield yourself from having to touch door handles, elevator buttons, or basically anything you didn’t want to make contact with bare skin. You just pulled your sleeve down a bit and used it between your hand whatever you needed to touch. I cannot understate how important my North Face jacket and a blue hoodie was in terms of providing me with my own PPE during the majority of this quarantine. It saved me from having to touch countless door handles and elevator buttons.
The pandemic, however, has now lasted long enough that the weather has turned from chilly to warm and sunny. It’s now t-shirt and shorts weather. All my t-shirts are short sleeves. If I wear those, I no longer have my trusty long sleeves to save me from having to touch things. So, I face a dilemma now. How do I dress for the warm weather but still have some level of protection?
The only compromise that I’ve come up with is to wear long-sleeved, button-up shirts, like an oxford. I can roll up the sleeves to handle the weather and then roll them down when I need to touch a surface. Not a great solution but perhaps a workable compromise.