Spring has arrived in DC, which means cherry blossoms and warmer weather. Last weekend, my daughter and I went to the National Kite Festival, an annual tradition since I first started living here.
Warm weather has also brought a new daily battle with our daughter over whether today is a Shorts Day. It’s a confusing time of year. Some days are cold and wet, some are oppressively warm. Some days can’t make up their minds.
When getting dressed for school, my daughter wants to wear shorts every day, no matter what. Honestly, if we let her, I think she wouldn’t even wear pants.
When I was growing up, our school had a very simple rule: if KYW (the local newsradio station, whose authority ranked somewhere near the Supreme Court, the Pope, or present-day Google) said today was going to be 80 degrees Fahrenheit, you could wear shorts. Easy and clean.
Nowadays, we don’t need a radio to know the weather. My coffee pot, dishwasher, and washing machine are all (inexplicably) connected to the internet, and I’m sure any of them would tell me how hot it’s going to be if I asked them nicely. Or more realistically, I can do what any modern day adult would do, and look at my phone. But my daughter hasn’t got a phone, and I am not about to start down that journey just to get the weather report.
So I built an app to recreate the Oracle of KYW. It runs on the Tidbyt, a fun device we keep in our living room for easy access to just this kind of information. It’s called Shorts Day, and it does one simple thing: tells you whether the forecast high for today is going to be above or below 80 degrees Fahrenheit (or whatever threshold temperature you want to set).
Granted, this may be of limited utility for anyone else, but I bet there’s a least a few other parents out there who might appreciate an outside arbiter in the springtime Shorts Wars, which is why I’m sharing it with others. It’s currently pending review as a public app, but in the meantime, if you want to check out the code, it’s here. I’ll update this post once the app is available through the Tidbyt app exchange.