Happy springtime in Philly. Will someone please tell me what jacket I’m supposed to wear?

Last week, while I was bundled up in my favorite winter coat, the one with the bushy (fake) fur hood, I saw another woman, about my age, wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top.

And alas, she and I have illustrated the great question of springtime in Philadelphia: How do you dress yourself when the temperature will swing a full 27 degrees today?

Every morning for the last several weeks has gone something like this: My minute-by-minute weather tracking app that I, for some reason, treat as the gospel, tells me today will be 40 degrees in the morning, 65 degrees in the afternoon, and a calm, cloudy 55 in the middle of the day. Great. I love to know how the weather will change as the day goes on! What did people do before this technology? The olden days sound weird!

I stare in the closet. Should I slap on this here puffy winter coat? I remember the days of winter as if they were yesterday. Because they were. I do not want to walk around cold, so it’s probably best to be cautious. If I get too hot, I can always wear it like a cape. Plus, a winter coat has other benefits: It really covers up the outfit underneath that I’m also not confident is weather-appropriate. (Is it too warm for sweaters?)

Perhaps I should put on this light spring jacket? It has a hood for when it rains in the middle of the day, and I know I won’t get too hot and end up feeling as if I’m stuck inside one of those pet snake glass boxes with the heat lamps. If I do get too hot, the jacket’s easy to carry, so I can just shed it. SSSSssssss.

OK, but 65 degrees is warm. Maybe I should just wear this pilled cotton hoodie from high school that I’ll probably take off. I wish I had a sleeveless sweatshirt I could wear without paying some sort of sick homage to the football team from New England. Should I just go to work jacket-naked and cross my fingers that, right now at 8 a.m., it feels more like 55 degrees than the 40 degrees my phone tells me it is? Perhaps my long-sleeve shirt itself is enough.

Wait, what does 55 degrees even feel like?

I inevitably choose wrong. Depending on the day, I either sweat halfway to the office and sit down at my desk looking as if I just blew in from the finish line of a triathlon or I freeze my toes off and immediately wobble to get some hot coffee and defrost my fingers.

I’m willing to guess most of you have chosen wrong, too. (Thank you for these tweets confirming my darkest suspicions. I look forward to your emails congratulating me on my ability to use Twitter’s advanced search function.)

You also may have chosen wrong for your kids, who are throwing tantrums every morning before school when you tell them it’s currently 38 degrees and rainy and, dammit Timmy, you’re going to contract the bubonic plague (or, these days, measles) if you don’t put on this jacket before going to catch the school bus.

Timmy cries and eventually succumbs to your wishes because you are “The Boss” and then later in the day he comes home hot and coat-less and tells you “told ya so” and you don’t have the heart to tell him he would have suffered from frozen nose hairs this morning if he hadn’t actually listened to you. Congratulations on holding back, Parent of the Year. I’ll put your trophy in the mail.

Our newsroom weather wizard, a.k.a. Tony Wood, tells me daily temperatures in April vary widely as solar energy intensifies in the Northern Hemisphere while cold air "fights back.” A key point, he says, is that air near the Earth’s surface warms faster than the upper air. Meanwhile, sunshine is particularly powerful this time of year, which also makes a difference in daily temperatures. (This temperature variation is a big reason there are rain and thunderstorms and middle-of-the-night tornado warnings, too.)

He says the bottom line is that, in April, the atmosphere doesn’t really know what to do. The atmosphere and I have a lot in common.

In the middle of writing this reflection for you, dear reader, I stepped outside sans coat for a cup of coffee because my app told me it’s 64 degrees and that seems warm. It wasn’t. I turned around and went back up to the third floor to put on my puffy coat with the fake fur hood. Then, ordering my caffeine, I was confronted with a new problem.

“Hot or iced?”