There are a lot of people who are like that.
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Well, I like you.
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I was born in a place that has about nine months of cold weather every year, including long term periodic bouts of barren trees, grey skies, snow-blanketed landscapes and bone-numbing freezing temperatures. Because I remained there for the first eighteen years of my life, it all became my paradigm; I was so accustomed to it that I never considered nor knew of any other option firsthand. Of course, there were a few trips away from there over the years, but they always took place in the summertime when school was out and half the country was on the road going somewhere anyway. The same summer heat that existed back home could be found at those vacation destinations, sometimes more intense or with more humidity, but I never experienced winter weather unless at home.
Then I joined the Marine Corps, and I was first stationed in sunny Southern California (by coincidence, I now live just 20 minutes driving distance from that base, and I’ve been in San Diego continuously since the mid-1990s). From there, I spent five straight years stationed in Hawaii, a location from which I deployed overseas aboard ship to the Western Pacific, hitting several Asian and decidedly tropical countries. There were also jaunts to Northern Africa, Australia, the Indian Ocean, etc. During my five-year stay in Hawaii, I was on three such deployments, each lasting six months, with eight months between each one being spent on Oahu.
There were some instances in which I was back in cold weather during those deployments, such as Northern Japan at the foot of Mount Fuji, where the Marine Corps maintained a mountain warfare training base, and participating in Exercise Team Spirit in South Korea, a place that I was in the absolute coldest environment in my entire life. The vast majority of my time in Hawaii and the Pacific, however, was always in the tropics.
After Hawaii, it was off to North Carolina for three years, with more overseas deployments. Ironically, even though my unit was supposed to go to Norway, Israel, England, France, Germany and other European locales, we were diverted to guess where? The Western Pacific! I repeated many of the same trips I had done before.
I rounded out my next chapter of Marine Corps life in places like Wisconsin, Central California, Southern California, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Okinawa, Japan, and the Philippines.
When I left military service, I had the opportunity to be shipped to anywhere in the continental US, primarily back to my point of origin, my hometown. There was absolutely no way on God’s green earth that I was leaving Southern California and the beautiful year-round weather in San Diego. I have been here ever since. I care nothing for four seasons or snow at Christmastime, in fact, I want to live out the remainder of my life without ever being in snow again.
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Nope, not at all, in fact, far from it. Certainly you don’t assume that Alaska is the only place that fits the description I gave, do you?
Second attempt at posting image:
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WelbyQuentin 