Good Old Winter

It's the dead of winter up here in Saskatch-E-WONe (typically how non-Saskatchewanians pronouce it, the proper pronounciation is Sask-ACH-e-wan), which is no surprise to any of you. And the fact that we got dumped on with a good old blizzard this past weekend should also not surprise anyone ('cept those of you from the Southern U.S., y'all ain't never seen the likes of this).

What is surprising is that the school buses have not run for the last two days and apparently won't be running tomorrow again. You see, us Prairie folk are hardy. A little snow never stopped us. Frankly, if life stopped everytime it snowed, we would be house bound for half the year. We actually mock other cities to the west and east of us when they get what we consider a normal amount of snow because they practically declare a state of emergency. For us, that's just another winter day. But to be fair, given that we experience such levels of snowfall so often, we have the resources to clear the streets much more so than these cities which we will not name.

Here is our front yard (notice how high the bank is - a good 4 feet) after Jay shovelled, and shovelled and shovelled the driveway, sidewalk and street in front of our house (the snow that you shovel has to go somewhere so it is normally piled up on the lawns).

Yes, I said the street. There was so much snow that it was causing cars to get stuck and given that we live on a quiet (relatively) residential street, we knew the plow would not be by for several days. Turns out the plow came by on Monday. I was praising the snow removal of our fair city until Jack and I went out later that night only to discover some main roads had yet to be plowed. Huh? Our quiet street has but not main road?

They must have seen poor Jay out there shovelling the street and took pity on him.

Monday morning dawned bright and clear. I walked with Jack and Kamden to school on account of the risk that there were hip deep drifts to plow through. They were not hip deep but definitely knee deep. Poor Kamden kept falling over. That's why I went along, getting up in knee deep powder is quite a challenge. I was just happy I never bit it. Now there would have been a sight to behold: 35 year old woman breaks hip while trying to dig herself out of snowbank. On second thought, let's not wish that on our worst enemies.

We actually had quite a good time plowing through the drifts. It is really kind of fun to thrash about in it and marvel at the power of Mother Nature.

By today, the plows had cleared the streets and everyone and his dog had dusted off their snow blowers. The dudes had this path to walk through today.

Easy peasy. However Old Man Winter is now back to his old tricks with cheek biting windchills which are all the more fun when he throws some snow into the gale. There is nothing quite like the sting of blowing snow on cold cheeks. Remind me again, why do I live here?

Just to give you an idea of how much snow there actually is, I took a picture of these benches. The snow is the same level as the bench.

And this is not piled up by the plow, this is what fell and/or was blown in by crotchety Old Man Winter. He was in hibernation there for a bit and he's awoken much like a Grizzly bear does in the spring: hungry, grouchy and ready to spread the misery.

But what else is new? Just another Saskatchewan winter day.