Too Much of a Good Thing

You can have too much of any­thing, be it snow, hol­i­day days off, or time spent indoors by the fire sip­ping hot choco­late. All of these things are good things, until you have too much of them.  The snow has def­i­nitely out­stayed its wel­come in Van­cou­ver in 2008/09. It is cer­tainly the most I’ve ever seen in the rel­a­tively short time I’ve lived here. It’s not only the depth, but the dura­tion and rep­e­ti­tion that has us going more than a lit­tle stir-crazy. It’s been 22 days of the white stuff on and off, but never melt­ing away, since the first of it fell on Decem­ber 13. (I learned from Frances Bula’s blog about the city that the record for Van­cou­ver is 33 days in 1964/65.) Pam and I have despaired that each time we dis­cuss ven­tur­ing out with the car, to make a trek down to meet my brother, or even just fill the tank, sure enough, the flakes start to fall some more and we shelve our plans yet again. We’ve been out, trudg­ing down to Granville Mar­ket and back with pro­vi­sions more than a cou­ple of times, but our lack of snow tires and the treach­er­ous roads have kept the car under­ground and unusable.

Things that I have learned from this Snowmegadon, as oth­ers have referred to it:

1. The city of Van­cou­ver has 47 snow ploughs. Yes, in Canada it’s spelled ‘plough’, not ‘plow’ as it is in the States. They are get­ting 5 more snow ploughs before the 2010 Olympics, which will bring the num­ber up to 52. That’s for the whole city.
2. Roofs here were not made for this kind of snow accu­mu­la­tion. There have been many col­lapses, although most of the seri­ous ones I’ve heard of involve north­ern Wash­ing­ton state, rather than BC, but I’m sure that there have been several.
3. YVR (the Van­cou­ver Air­port), despite being voted Best Air­port in North Amer­ica in 2006 and 2007 is also not made for this kind of weather. It has peri­od­i­cally had to shut down. There have been many sto­ries of peo­ple spend­ing days (and sleep­ing there at night) dur­ing some of those shut-downs. Lug­gage has piled up. Who wants to bet it won’t get that high a stand­ing in next year’s vote?
4. Rats don’t take a snow day hol­i­day. Pam and I saw one in the snow:
   Ratty in the Snow

I’m sure that I’m putting on weight from all the cook­ing I’ve been doing. Tonight it was Thai-Style yel­low Curry. Last night it was Swedish Meat­balls (if we were going to have Scan­di­na­vian style weather, then by golly, we were going to eat that way too).  Late Decem­ber and early Jan­u­ary has seen Pot Roast, Roasted Lemon-Herb Chicken, Pizza (all from from scratch) Souvlaki-style Pork (from Costco),  Kasha Var­nishkes (Buck­wheat Groats and Far­falle for those who aren’t famil­iar) French Toast, Buck­wheat Pan­cakes, and other assorted home­made culi­nary projects like apple­sauce and sweet pickles.

We’ve also got­ten to bed later and later and slept in later and later, until I finally said the night before last that we had to adjust back to PST, rather than the roughly Hawai­ian time zone that we seemed to be liv­ing in.

Now, with the hol­i­days offi­cially over, I’m hop­ing that we can escape our condo and get out and about. Besides, blog­ging about the weather is almost as bor­ing as being cooped up for the past 22 days.