Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘winter’

It’s about flippin’ time, too! It’s just not January when you can see the grass.

Woohoo!

Woohoo, first major snowfall of the season! Winter’s here!

I get giddily happy when it snows, so I was dancing around like a little kid most of the day enjoying the weather.

Here are a couple of snapshots:

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Okay, so it’s not nearly as dramatic as Ice Storm 98. But today’s freezing rain left the trees beautiful but the houses dark.

Driving through the darkened streets was eerie, with a Halloween-like effect as the ice-laden tree branches shone in the reflection of headlights. Dinner with the folks was by candlelight – luckily it was cooked by the time the lights went out. And those with generators are finding that their lights act as beacons to neighbours seeking the use of a stove or a battery charger.

It’s only been a few hours so far, but most people in the dark pockets are already digging in for the long haul, as there’s no word when Loto-Hydro will have things up and running again.

Luckily I seem to still have power (knock wood) so I’m hoping things stay lit and warm here. And the trees really are beautiful; if the ice hasn’t melted off them by tomorrow, I’ll try to get some photos in the daylight.

It’s a beautiful sunny crisp fall day here in Montreal, which makes this all the more surreal:

Buffalo lay all but paralyzed Friday after a record-breaking early snowstorm whited-out the brilliant colors of fall, buried pumpkins and apples and caught this city world-famous for its wintry weather flat-flooted. At least three deaths were blamed on the storm.

The heavy, wet snow snapped tree limbs all over western New York, leaving some 350,000 homes and businesses without power.

A state of emergency was in effect across the region, banning all nonessential travel. Branches and power lines lay draped across cars and houses, and normally busy downtown streets were still, blanketed by up to two feet of snow.

It’s really rare to get any snow at all in October, and when it happens, it hardly ever does more than dust the ground before melting quickly away. And that’s Montreal I’m talking about; for Buffalo, it’s even weirder. For a massive snowstorm of this scale to hit Buffalo at any time of winter is pretty extraordinary, but in mid-October?

I blame Friday the 13th. Hey, it’s as good an explanation as any.

According to the Canadian groundhogs, it will be an early spring. Neither Wiarton Willie nor Shubenacadie Sam saw their shadows.

It’s been one of the warmest winters on record, so I can’t say the news comes as a surprise. Frankly, I’m getting annoyed. This weather is wreaking havoc with my ski season, not to mention turning the roads into giant potholes.

• Washing dishes
• Parking space thieves
• How the less people know, the more arrogant they tend to be
• Freezing mist
• Hollywood award shows
• Neighbours who sing off-key in the shower at 6am on Sundays
• Mornings, in general

Just to name a few…

This morning I went to exercise my right to vote. It was a little more complicated than I thought it would be, though.

My polling station is at an elementary school right around the corner from me, so I walked over and arrived a few minutes after the polls opened.

Firstly, shame on the city of Montreal for failing to salt the sidewalks outside the schools being used as polling stations. This environmentally-friendly gravel-only policy is all very well and good, but there are plenty of senior citizens or other mobility-challenged people in my area who were having lots of trouble getting in and out of the building.

At any rate, when I got inside, it wasn’t too crowded; only about a dozen people were in line in front of me. What I didn’t know then was that all of them were for the same poll number – mine – and that they had been standing there for 10 minutes already. It would take another 25 before I could go in.

All the other polls were empty, and people were being directed straight inside when they arrived. However, at my station, there was an elderly woman with a visual impairment and someone accompanying her, and apparently they were having problems because it took them over a half hour. In the meantime, they weren’t allowing anyone else to vote. Never mind that there were two people at the table, and only one was helping them. Never mind that there were five other completely empty tables with nobody there. No, we all had to wait it out, because they didn’t have any kind of provisions for people with special needs to be taken aside and assisted without holding up the line. Smart, eh?

All I can say is that if the country is being run the same way as this election, then we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.

It’s freezing rain again. Ugh. January so far has sucked for skiing, and indications for this weekend are not good. Why can’t we have a good old-fashioned snowstorm for a change?

How odd. Last time I had a snow day, I think I was about eight years old and happy to skip out on third grade.

But here I am, dug out of all snowbanks and warm and dry at home… on the boss’s orders. Go figure. (Maybe the fact that it took him nearly two hours to get into the office might have made him more amenable to cancelling work for the rest of us).

So far, over 30 centimetres have fallen, and the prediction is for quite a bit more, and it’s created quite a mess on the roads:

Ministère des Transports traffic camera: Autoroute 40 at Iberville at 11:15am

People are still getting around, but the going is very, very slow. One traffic report mentioned that employees of the Tim Horton’s on Cote de Liesse near Hickmore were serving coffee to stranded motorists who had parked and gotten out of their cars, figuring they weren’t going anywhere for a while.

It’s really kind of sad, though. We Montrealers love to brag about how even the biggest snowstorms leave us unfazed. And yet, here we are, the first major dump of the season, and suddenly traffic is a nightmare and schools, flights, and pretty much everything else is cancelled. Sure, the snowfall occurred mostly at rush hour, and it’s falling too fast for the snow crews to keep up, but it still seems like we ought to be able to cope with the white stuff a bit better by now.

Oh well. Time to curl up with some hot cocoa and watch the snow from the window.