You Know It's Winter in Taipei When...

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1. Your balcony plants are so wet all the time they start to mold.

2. The sun comes out for 5 minutes and everyone rushes to post about it on Facebook.

3. You overhear your children commenting "What a nice day it is!" when it's merely darkly overcast instead of pouring down rain.

4. You wistfully look back on November as "that time when we saw the sun for 2 straight hours one day."

5. Your concrete-box apartment has cooled to a balmy 287 degrees Kelvin.

6. You start converting temperatures into Kelvin in an attempt to fool yourself that it's warmer than it feels.

7. The tile floors in your flat are roughly the same temperature as, say, the Arctic.

8. When you finally manage, through a combination of space heaters, towels under doors, and dehumidifiers, to bring the temperature in your living room up to 17 degrees C, you feel a ridiculous sense of accomplishment.

9. Your shoes start growing fuzzy green sweaters in an attempt to stay warm.

10. You start measuring the rain accumulation for the month in feet rather than inches.

11. You have to stop using the phrase "Save it for a rainy day" because it has lost all of its meaning.

12. The neighborhood car wash starts handing out sun-checks.

13. A vacation in the Sahara begins to sound positively delightful.

14. You start counting days of consecutive rain and mist in days...then weeks...then months as time passes.

15. If you stand still too long you start growing moss on your north-facing side.