The Great White North

Last night the temperature rose to around 0° Celsius for the first time in a long time. We went clumping out into the softening snow wearing boots but no jackets - it just didn't feel cold enough for a jacket.

After days of temperatures in the -20°C range the warmth was something to revel in, and it has stayed with us overnight.

We woke this morning to find it raining. All the snow has been washed off our back deck but the driveway has turned into a sheet of very smooth ice with about two inches of rainwater on top of it. Impossible to walk on! The roads are the same as the driveway, and therefore this warm weather has caused school to be cancelled for all the kids in town.


The forecast says that we'll be back into sub-freezing temperatures tomorrow which is too bad. One more warm day might have melted the ice sheets on our driveway and the roads, but we'll have to keep them instead. Our best hope is that it snows over the ice and traction increases.

The warm snap makes me think about winter in Victoria, where the weather hovers around 8°C almost all winter but the damp chill never leaves your bones and the rainclouds never leave the skies. Why did that feel so much colder than this? My guess is that the lack of sunlight for weeks on end sapped my will to live just a little. The strange thing is, everyone from Victoria brags about Victorian winters to the rest of Canada. They say things like "oh, it almost never gets down to freezing here!", or "yes, it's February now and the Cherry trees are in bloom". But honestly, is it really worth it when you're facing six solid months of grey skies and rain? A couple of winters ago in Victoria we had THIRTY-NINE straight days of rain in a row. I blame Mark's secret dream of building an arc on the time we spent living on Vancouver Island.