Words are inadequate

Some serious winter weather came through most of BC in the last couple of days. In the Interior this manifested as being Very Cold; I don't think it ever got down below -40 but definitely approached it.

Here we got a bunch of snow, maybe fifteen cm on Sunday and then another thirty on Tuesday. On Sunday I foolishly went out to have brunch with Mya and a couple of her friends. I drove very slowly and carefully and only had the antilock brakes kick in a couple of times. I was still nervous coming home; I live on the side of a hill, so I could either try to go up and maybe get stuck, or try to go down and maybe just slide to the bottom and then get stuck, possibly crashing into things on my way. In the event it was fine, though a bit nerve-wracking.

The real problem is that I was supposed to fly north yesteday, so I'd be up there for solstice. Instead YVR cancelled something like 90% of all flights yesterday while the snow was falling. I was a complete wreck yesterday, trying to do work while getting ready to go and keeping an eye on the flight schedule, and ended up doing little work while failing to get ready to go. So I switched my flight to this morning. ("But your flight is still listed as ON TIME," the Westjet person said. Ha ha, good joke, everybody laugh. When I checked back later that night it too had been CANCELLED.)

So I hauled myself down to the airport this morning. I left myself extra time to get there and it still took twice as long as normal. If my flight hadn't been delayed I would have still made it (with minutes to spare, even) but it would have been a close thing. Alas, all for naught: I used the delay to get breakfast and by the time I was done it had moved into CANCELLED, along with many many other flights. Stupid airport.

So I'm at home on solstice night, alone with a cat who's decided that the proper way to express "play with me" is through teeth.

Vancouver in the snow, at least as seen from the skytrain, is gorgeous, I will give it that. Snow drifting on the evergreens, and snow on the soft lines of the rooftops, and the snow-dusty mountains in the background. If I had been more awake I would have enjoyed it more but it was still something of a balm.

There's a guy who's putting together a bus run from Prince George to Vancouver and back. If there's still a seat, I could take the bus north on Friday, and fly back here on Tuesday like I'd planned. Will see what shakes out from that.

It's snowing outside, but it wasn't for the two-hour drive home last night. I did catch a few glimpses of an amazing aurora borealis, though, all white-green and swoopy.

I have tea and a chapter of A Night in the Lonesome October, and then probably further into my physically delightful SubPress The Kingdom of Gods. Last night I finished a third reread of The Scholars of Night, at which I got to say GODDAMMIT MIKE. One of the joys of rereading JMF's books is the increasing frequency at which I get to say GODDAMMIT MIKE as I pick up on yet another buried gem. I had pancakes, but they are sadly all gone.

I vacuumed this morning for the first time in weeks. I always forget how much "not walking on dirt / bits of dried mud in bare feet" immediately improves my mood and my quality of life.

Last week I got a small Bluetooth speaker and set it over my stove. It's now playing "Kind of Blue," though I think it's nearly over.

The rain falls down,
The wind blows up,
I've spent all the pennies
In my old tin cup.
--Clyde and/or Wendy Watson, Father Fox's Pennyrhymes

The Kelowna trip had some very good parts and I am still assessing the damage both fiscal and personal/interpersonal. But that's an Afternoon job, at the earliest.

Snow in Vancouver, so of course I came back this week. It's been record-breakingly cold (minus teens, I believe), and the snow from the weekend hadn't melted when it dropped another I'm guessing 15cm last night / this morning. Translink is referring to it as "an extreme travel day" and recommending that people stay home.

I came in to work, mostly because I walked out the door of the coffeeshop where I got breakfast (poached eggs on smoked salmon on toast; not quite an Eggs Halifax but decent) and saw someone getting out of an Evo (Vancouver-based carshare). I was already Not Excited about sitting in my Airbnb and using the work VPN which spent last week being extremely flaky, so I snagged the car and took half an hour to drive the 5km to work.

This is I suppose better than back home, which got ~20cm of snow last Friday morning when we left and was reportedly minus forty degrees this morning.

... and now it's dumping something serious out there, again/still. Definitely time to head for "home".

I have acquired a bed, my first new bed in, well, ever. Bought a mattress and boxspring from a place near work that delivered them, and went out to Abbotsford to buy a nice-looking new-to-me wood-and-iron bedframe. It's a touch large for the room it's in, which is likely to be true as long as I'm in a Vancouver apartment. But it's not a modern solid headboard, which I hate, and it looks nice with Pop Shackelford's dresser and bedside table. And the mattress is pretty comfy.

Been spending a stupendous amount of money on getting the household up to speed. I think it's more or less there at this point. Furnishing a kitchen can get expensive, I tell you what, and I'm deliberately staying away from (most of) the less-useful kitchen gadgetry. But one needs knives and pots and cooking implements and and and...

And I have a rescue plant. It was a buck at Canadian Tire. Apparently it likes indirect light and not being watered for a couple of weeks at a time, which ought to work out pretty well all around.

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Erin came down last weekend for a day or so, which was lovely, and then we (I) drove her new-to-her car north through a blinding snowstorm. I have never had the experience of not being able to see the road in front of me while driving, which happened for several seconds any time someone passed me in either direction. I can't say as I much care for it. Or for highway driving at 50 kph.

On Sunday the falling snow had all but stopped, but there were plenty of piles on the shoulder and slick spots on the highway. We passed a section where cars had been deliberately driving into a ditch the night before to avoid an accident in the road, and said "Yep, there's some tire tracks on the shoulder and a couple bits of car," and the next thing I knew I was headed into the ditch myself. Near as I can tell I drifted just a bit into the deep snow on the shoulder, and that pulled me into the rest of it, and there we were. Still drivable but no way to drive out of a metre of snow, so we waited a couple hours for BCAA to send a tow truck, and were fine if a bit shaken.

Other than that, we started watching Star Trek (the original). I'm finding it a curious and enjoyable mix of "of its time" (visuals, styling, occasionally the minor characters) and just plain good. Pretty sure most of my Trek knowledge comes from the first five movies and cultural osmosis. Somehow SF TV never really made an impact on me when I was a kid. I'm sure I've seen episodes but the only one I can recall at all is "Amok Time."

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And now I'm home again, with a list of things I'd like to take care of this week and some uncertainty as to how motivated I'll be to do any of them. We shall see.

I didn't really expect it to snow again this week, but I'll take it. The flakes started coming down sometime very early this morning. The little courtyard outside was covered by the time I went swimming before sunup, not that that's any great achievement when the sun doesn't come up until after eight AM.

I took an extra-long lunch to go wander around in the snow. It was still falling in big fat drifty flakes for the whole time I was out there. This made for a very picturesque walk, during which I couldn't see much on account of having my glasses covered in big fat wet snowflakes.

This was a good snow. Snowpocalypse dumped a lot more snow, but that was all powdery stuff, no good for anything. This was nice and packable, and if I'd had company I would have considered turning Cardero Park into a Calvinesque sculpture garden. Some things just aren't as much fun when you're by yourself. Also, the one snowball I rolled up in Cardero Park picked up the snow too well, and also the dead leaves and mud. Brownish snowmen are just unpleasant.

So I went for a ramble around Lost Lagoon instead.

... and I seem to be incapable of talking about it. There was snow on evergreens, cold and crunchy underfoot and wet and drifty overhead. A number of ducks and other waterfowl were sulking in the lagoon (including an elegant pair of hooded mergansers, and one extremely disgruntled blue heron). I don't think I stopped grinning for at least half an hour. It felt so good to be out, to see snow, to be wrapped up in my nice wool coat and my fuzzy-inside boots and my hat and to feel the cold as something outside of me. I think this snow is the first thing I've been genuinely excited and happy about in a long time.

And then I had a pancake the size of my head for lunch, and came home and had tea.

Sadly, my fuzzy-inside boots from 2005, while still admirably performing their primary function of keeping my feet warm, are beginning to fail in their secondary function of keeping my feet protected from the elements. Specifically, the rubber sole of the left one has started to disintegrate, and now lets water in. Last winter I spent a day taking them all over Vancouver in hope of finding a cobbler who could repair them, and everyone looked at them and shrugged. Oh well. They work well enough for this winter. Eight years is a pretty good run for boots, too, and I'll replace them next November when I'm in Tysons again.

What more can I say? It's still the best city I've spent any amount of time in. (A vanishingly small set, admittedly.) We arrived at the very end of the winter grey: the sky was perfectly clear the entire time except for a touch of rain/snow on Monday, and then a light snowstorm all day Satyrday. We rode buses and Skytrain and ate lots and lots of delicious food and walked around and saw things. We took very few pictures: at first the rechargeable batteries were all dead, and then it was just too cold to want to bother fumbling with gloves and camera. We found a Chinese bakery where they make buns and dumplings and bean-paste sesame balls, and sell them at prices that seem obscenely cheap.

An apartment was not forthcoming. Most places appear to require only 30 days' notice before vacating, so very few of the agencies we talked to had any idea what their stock for late May would be like. And since I've blown all my vacation on this trip plus moving, I guess I'm sending uilos back out there in another month or two to look at available apartments. On the other hand, from the places we did see we got a better idea of what we're looking for (relatively large, and a "den" is Not Sufficient for an office since the "dens" we saw were smaller than my closet in the current apartment) and where. So that was helpful, if not as much as I'd hoped.

A friend of A--'s got in touch with me a week or so before we left, and we caught up with him for an hour or so on Wednesday to talk about life in Vancouver. Nothing earth-shattering, at least not that I recall. Just good conversation in a pleasant little coffeeshop / breakfast-place.

Other than that and one group of fairly welcoming gamers on Tuesday night, the human interaction was negligible. Meh. I'm slightly disheartened but only slightly.

And that snowstorm on Satyrday ("up to 5 cm" does not sound at all impressive) really made my week. There is something wonderful about walking through a snowfall in a trenchcoat and hat and sunglasses and sandals. Winter and snow are the things I'm most afraid of missing, environment-wise. Good to know that they'll still be around.

I know why the vampire sparkles!: "By now, I’m sure you’re all with me: vampires are bugs. But what kind?"

Count von Count, as a Nobilis 3rd edition character. He's the Count of The Count, of course. "That which is true of the Count, and of the Count of the Count, is thereby true for all." (I've missed Hitherby Dragons.)

Brick your phone.

---

I sleep better when I don't dream ("remember my dreams or even that I dreamed at all," whatever). Seems like every day last week I woke up in the middle of a dream, which makes for a groggy jazzfish. I mentioned this to my counselor and she gave me a tincture of something called scullcap. It's supposed to help me sleep better or rearrange my sleep pattern or some such. I'm not totally clear.

It's not really helping. The last two nights I've had clear, if jumbled, memories of having spent the whole night dreaming, instead of just the few minutes before I wake up. Yesterday was awful. Today seems to be a little better but I still have no focus. And way too many things going on that I want and need to be wrangling and taking care of.

I can admire (what's left of) the snow, though, and the way the sunlight drifted through the ice on my rear windshield this morning.

So yesterday was going to be a nice relaxing random vacation day.

( It mostly was. )

Hey, Jamin Winans has a new short film: Uncle Jack. This one has just a bit of the feel of Ink to it, and is a lot of fun regardless.

There's also a small selection of Snowpocalypse photos from my corner of the world. The two snowfolk are from today: the last inch or two that fell was sufficiently wet that it could be rolled up, sort of. So uilos and I built a snowman to wait for the Metrobus, and another smaller one to wave at the rental office. I can't remember the last time I built a snowman. For whatever reason the snow around here tends to be of the powdery sticks-to-nothing variety, good for looking pretty and getting down in one's gloves and collar but no good at all for packing or rolling.

Work tomorrow, and only a 50% chance of more snow on Monday. I'm preemptively declaring the snowpocalypse to be over with. I'll miss it: we never lost power or ran out of food, and the apartment complex has been really good about getting the sidewalks shoveled out. On the other hand it'll be nice to not have to worry about denting my cookie sheet any more, and to have sufficient food in the grocery store.

So, I'm at work today.

Anderson Road, despite having had snowplows up and down it for the past two days, is still in less than stellar shape. I can only imagine what the actual back roads are like. (123 and International are both perfectly clear.)

Mostly I've been very impressed by the local snowplowing, and by the power company. We had a couple of flickers on Friday night, nothing more. The water heater even stayed on. Hearing the reports of power outages and housebound-ness coming in from further out has solidified my desire to never live any further out from a population center, or be any more car dependent, than I am right now. I don't doubt that there are advantages to such things; they're just Not For Me.

They say it'll start dropping another five to twenty inches later this afternoon. That's about the point when I stop admiring the pretty white stuff and start getting genuinely concerned. Where are they going to put another five to twenty inches of snow from the roads?

Of course, it hasn't actually started yet, so this may be a big fake-out. We shall see. . .