You know how the song goes and with Christmas around the corner the fire certainly is delightful here. Not getting many days over zero now and flurries are predicted for just about every day this week. However a white Christmas is not an absolute cert. according to the locals, apparently it often snows 2 or 3 times before the end of December and then might dry up for a little while. In any case we’ll be in Vegas on the 25th so it wont matter either way, hopefully the fat red guy can manage without us cos the kids wont see their presents until the 28th. The houses in the neighbourhood are starting to be dressed up for the holiday with just about everyone choosing to hand lights outside. Some go further, the 6 foot hight inflatable snow globes with vacuum powered snow being blown around inside are a hoot, they’re about $200 at Canadian Tire but I haven’t been tempted yet :-). I hang our lights yesterday as there wasn’t much snow around (don’t want to slip off an icy ladder) but it was hairy enough in gusty -10 degree winds and some flurries. I had my cold weather gear on and it was hard to hang the lights off the guttering with my gloves on but the alternative was probably frost bite.
We had our first snow storm of the year about a week ago and I had to drive off to work in it. Getting to the office wasn’t too bad (took an hour rather than 40mins) but it continued to snow throughout the day so the car got covered. Luckily Jo had gone to Candian Tire the day before and bought a snow scraper so I had a nice ‘Fargo’ moment (without my gloves) cleaning the car before I drove off. Anti-freeze washer fluid is worth it’s weight in gold I can tell you. The journey home sucked with the 403 jam packed and everyone doing 5-10kph turning my 25k trip into a 90 minute crawl. I guess that’s better than seeing everyone try to drive at 100 in it though, that would have scared me. So it was snow shoveling the driveway and salting the paths on Saturday, you’ve gotta keep that accumulation down as the bottom layer turns to ice and it’s almost impossible to move. We’ve paid to have a guy come out throughout the season and clear the drive way after storms. It’s a pretty common thing to do here and costs about $300 for the whole winter, if there’s more than 5cm then he’ll be here before I leave for work and have the driveway cleared with a plow.
Oh yeah, when the Commonwealth Games is on next year whatever you do don’t drink Hardy’s Nottage Hill while you watch it. The buggers are sponsoring the Canadian team! Fricken cheeky I reckon.
Skating is going really well, it’s amazing how a few lessons really tidies your technique up. Jo and I are now pretty confident on our blades and I’ve almost got that cool stopping maneuver (side on blades showering ice everywhere) worked out, awesome! But going backwards is doing our heads in, Jo’s much better at it than me, I have no clue at all. Cam is getting much better too and can get around by himself fairly well, we’ll see how he goes today as we have a free skate session planned for the afternoon.
No comments:
Post a Comment