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.