Real Winter

We get smug sometimes when we look at the weather endured by other parts of Canada. I confess to even having used this blog to "educate" some of our southern neighbours (yes, brit. spelling) about the climate of this part of the great white north. At one point I'd even posted a link to a site about the thousands of palm trees growing in our metro area.

Still, every so often--maybe five years or so--we get a little taste of what others take for granted each winter. It tends to show that we're not all that well prepared. Partly it's that we live surrounded by coastal rainforest, and that means very large trees with limbs that break when the snow and ice get too heavy, or which simply fall down entirely.

These can smash houses on rare occasions, but more often they bring down power lines and people struggle on without electricity for a while. One girl in my English class yesterday explained that she lives in an outlying area which hasn't had electricity for five days; I heard on the radio this morning that some such affected areas won't be getting any power before Saturday.

One area has also been without phone service for three days. Fortunately for us, we've been pretty much spared power outages.

It was -10 celcius last night, which is 14 on the Fahrenheit scale. It's about 22 right now and we're expecting snow to start within the next couple of hours. Still, they predict it will be rain by tomorrow.

On the bright side, our Australian exchange teacher, who finishes her year with us in a few weeks, is thrilled she got a taste of weather typical of elsewhere in Canada, and it's also very pretty to look at.

Here are a few pics:












Our street












also our street--looking next door












our back yard












my kids enjoying the snow








...and the fountain in our school courtyard yesterday--I wish I'd got the pic when the sun was still shining on it, though