Wintry

Man and Dog on Car, originally uploaded by kpwerker.

From the quiet sanctuary of a location plagued only by the looming Big One (earthquake) that might or might not happen between tomorrow and a couple hundred years from now, I love me some dramatic weather.

However unpleasant Vancouver winters might be, what with all the dark and rain and greyness, we don’t often get foul weather—by which I mean weather that’s the stuff of newscasts, emergency plans, canned food, drama.

Granted, in the last couple of years we’ve had ourselves some doozies of a storm. Stanley Park’s seawall just opened again after last year’s decimating windstorm, only to be closed again this weekend from a mudslide. There was the turbidity thing last year that had us boiling water for a couple of weeks because the rain caused runoff into the reservoirs (and we might have another warning coming). We got a foot of snow in a storm last year; it was impressive even by my long-defunct upstate New York standards.

This past weekend Vancouver got itself some good snow, from what I hear. We were up at Whistler for our first ski day of the season*. We knew some snow was expected on Sunday, but whatever. Dude. That “expected snow” ended up being well over half a metre. We left to come back to the city on Sunday only to turn around an hour (and 25km) later, deciding it wasn’t worth the torture. Ten minutes later the road was closed, anyway. It’s fun to be snowed in! We made it home yesterday.

This storm is ongoing, only with dramatically raised temperatures. And that means rain. Lots of rain. Like, the city went and put “don’t park here from 7am-5pm for street cleaning” signs on our street at 8 o’clock this morning, and the street cleaner has been up or down our street a handful of times. Lazy planners? I actually suspect they’re on a storm-related kick to clear the streets ASAP to avoid sewer problems from all the rain. Good, city.

And now I’ve gotten talk of the weather out of my system.

*I’ve been battling over what I think of skiing. I think that after seven years of getting to know it and getting pretty okay at it, I’m sort of bored by it. It might be that I haven’t found the perfect skiing buddy (one I’m not holding back speed-wise, and who’s easy-going and in it for the fun). It might be that Whistler and Blackcomb are too big to navigate when I’m not wearing my glasses. Regardless, I’ve decided to be a fair-weather skier, and to enjoy snow in other ways, maybe simply by watching it fall. Oh, well.