Snow day - in response to a comment in Wilma's Blog

I was reading Wilma's blog and realized that I'm one of those relatives sitting somewhere in Canada who can't empathize with her regarding the spring snow.  Its now officially spring but we woke up on Sunday morning to about 30 cm (or about a foot) of snow.  That almost broke a record for a one day snowfall in Calgary for March - the record is 38cm.   The  average snowfall for all of March is 21 cm.  And the forecast is for more snow this week.

I had early morning meetings on Sunday.  I went to my first meeting (6:30am)  and only 3 of us made it - there should have been 7.   The roads were a mess.   Just by our house the bus couldn't make it up the hill and was blocking the road.    I just about didn't make it.  I didn't make it up the last hill to the Stake Center.   I went back down to try again and got stuck.  Luckily a nice young man in a pickup truck stopped to help push me out.   We were the first ones there and there was a foot of snow on the sidewalks so our meeting consisted of shoveling snow.   We do have a snow blower at the church and I went to get it out but it was out of gas.  Luckily there was a 5 gallon gas can there - no wait - it was empty too.   We didn't want to go get gas on Sunday - plus with the roads the way they were we didn't even know if we could get out and back in our cars.    No one showed up for the 7:30 meeting because of the snow.   Some people couldn't get out of their driveways or out of their neighborhoods.   I heard of one of my friends who took 3 hours to dig out of his place.   At our 9am start time, there were about 10 people at church.   The ironic thing is that at least 3 of these were single senior sisters.   People showed up all through the meeting.  

We should have had a snow day.

I took this picture as Judy as she came home from shopping Monday afternoon.  You can see that the pile of snow on our lawn from shoveling the sidewalk and driveway is still about 4 feet high.  Its never been like that in Calgary since I can remember.  In Calgary we have chinooks - warm west winds that melts the snow in hours.   There are stories of the temperature going from -20C to +20C in an couple of hours when a chinook blows in.  The record for a one day temperature change due to a chinook is from -48C (-56F) to 9C (49F).  Usually when we get a heavy snowfall within a week or two a warm chinook will come and melt all the snow.  This year we haven't seen these extreme chinooks.   We've had snow on the ground since December.  

Just on Friday I was commenting on how the snow was finally all melted from our deck.   Here's what it looks like now.

I'm not complaining - okay maybe I am a little.   Why do we live in a place where you have to spend hours shoveling snow to get your vehicle out of your driveway only to drive somewhere that takes an hour (instead of the regular 10 minutes) only to get stuck or slide off the road so you can spend a couple more hours digging out so you can spend another hour driving back home?  

I can think of a few reasons.

1. Cockroaches and rats don't like it either so they don't hang out here.
2. We enjoy the summer more (winter is like hitting your head against the wall - it feels so good when it stops).
3. We're crazy.

On a totally different note.   People wanted to see pictures of my new glasses being modeled by me.

These are my $23 glasses (I referred to them as $27 glasses in my last blog entry, but that was with the $4 clip-on sunglasses).   I'm also wearing a Columbia shirt from NPS.