Freeze Farm

The early-morning skies last Sunday were quite ominous.  It was a very unseasonal +7C that morning.  Dark skies like this aren't exactly common during winter-time.  I watched the weather roll in, and within minutes, the first of many snow squalls hit:

Snow squalls are interesting if you're inside warm by the fire with many furry friends at your feet.  If you're on the road and one of these babies hits, you'll gain new appreciation for road delineators, and if you can't see those, there are always hydro poles to guide you, preferably before they make contact with your front bumper.

You can't even make our barn out in the above photo, but it's there where it always is when I look out of my wide screen TV, a.k.a. the kitchen window.  When I was joking about the Transport Quebec mouthpiece talking about vizzie-billie-tee zee-roh in my earlier post, this is what he means.  Zero visibility.  The tractor might be 50 feet away from where I took my photo, and it's barely visible.

We had a great sunset Sunday evening when the skies cleared up:

Snow squalls are generally harbingers of colder weather.  But just how cold, well, let's just qualify it as c-o-l-d:

Conditions of -27C on Wednesday.  This morning the mercury read -24C.  Well, my zest for life just flew out the window with a forecast like that.  That pretty much sums things up these days.

I went to get our weekly flyers out of the mailbox when I got home this afternoon.  Eric was out in the woodshed splitting wood, and Cooper was shivering outside on alternating legs, (he spends a total of 60 seconds outside these days), so I figured I might as well make the trek to the mailbox and bring the flyers in.  The proverbial wimp in me wanted to rush into the house and cast my layers aside, and hug the wood stove like my life depended on it.  However, the true Canadian in me, said, "go ahead, get the flyers in the house, it won't kill ya".

With a windchill hovering around -30C, it's not just cold, it's freezing cold.  I wish I could adequately impress upon you how cold that feels, and unless you've experienced it, you can't possibly comprehend.  You know the dreaded brain-freeze you get from eating ice cream?  Well, you get the same thing during these temps, but you get it from simply inhaling.  That's how cold it is.  I could have thrown myself in a snow bank and let a swift death overcome me, and trust me, at these temps, it's just a matter of time before exposure does a person in.

It's not all aches and pains, though.  My new-used car?  It came with a remote starter.  Wheeeee! is the sound I make these mornings, watching my car start from the comfort of our warm house.  Actually, wheeee (minus the exclamation point) is also the sound the car makes when it starts on days this cold.  Hearing a car start in weather like this is painful.  Even the LCD display on the dash takes a while to come to life.

Another upside?  The sunsets:

Absolutely fabulous.  The peaks of snow in the forefront are man-made.  The city comes by with their big snow plow and blows the snow into the field across the street.  Given the windy conditions, our road would become narrower and narrower with each passing hour.  It basically buys the snow-plow operator a bit of time between his rounds.

Monday's forecast shows a high of -7C, which, while not T-shirt weather, will feel positively balmy when this cold spell finally breaks.

In the interim, I'll have to keep myself occupied by throwing yet another log onto the fire, picking up my knitting, and brewing another cuppa tea.  Survival of the fittest, Shim Farm-style.

Vizzie-billie-tee Zee-roh

Environment Canada finally got it right!  Well...sort of.  They forecast anywhere from 15 to 25 centimeters of the white stuff.  We've had about 40 cm already, which is well over a foot, with more on the way by the time the system passes this evening.  When this storm is said and done, we might have up to 50 cm, and coupled with 60 km winds and a windchill of -15C, we're looking at a cold white mess.

Want proof?

That's proof.  A cold white mess.

Like the Transport Quebec mouth-piece kept saying on the radio:  vizzie-billie-tee zee-roh.  Or visibility zero, if you need the translation.

Our snow removal contractor came by this morning, and within 45 minutes, it was like he hadn't even come by at all.  In fact, he's been by twice already, and it's impossible to tell with the drifting.

And my car?  You want to know where my car is? Why, it's in the garage:

And it's behind a 3-foot high wall of snow.  We keep the doors open because we'd never be able to open them with frost-heave and snow accumulation.

It looks like I won't be going anywhere until when?  March?

A blizzard like this comes along once in a while, and truth be told, we've become soft over the past few years.  I remember storms like this as a kid, where it took days to dig out from a big snowfall, but in recent years, we might have one or two big storms over 30 cm per season.  No big deal, really, but when it's combined with heavy winds, zero visibility, and reports of snow plows in the ditch, the only real option is to hunker down by the fire, grab some knitting, make some tea, and ride it out like the big white wave it is.

There'll be plenty of time for digging out tomorrow.  (Or in March?)

The look on Bob's face says it all:

I know this cat so well, I can tell you exactly what's going through his head.  He's saying, "dammit, eventually, I'm going to have to break down and use the litter box.  Or maybe Mom won't notice if I poop in this box"?  Bob, don't even THINK of it.

The worried look on his face also happens to resembles mine (minus the fur) as I take the last piece of firewood and chuck it into the wood stove, knowing full well that my next pit stop is going to be the wood shed.  The thought of spending the rest of my day freezing doesn't sit well.  During storms like this, power failures are much more likely, generally because some inexperienced driver has taken out a hydro pole.  A small localized power-outage like that is low on Hydro Quebec's totem pole, pardon the pun.  Speaking from experience, those power failures are the last to be restored.  Currently, there are major road closures all over the place, reports of hundreds of cars and trucks in the ditch and snow plows that can't even hope to keep up with the rate of falling snow.  Even public transportation has been suspended for the rest of the day.

Police are urging people to stay home, the ministry of transportation keeps adding to their list of road closures, yet people are still insistent on heading out.  It never ceases to amaze me.

I also made the mistake of listening to a local Montreal call-in radio show today.  I normally listen to Vermont Public Radio because the content is more...ahem....intellectual.  Listening to the cross-section of morons people describing "random acts of kindness" has me dumb-founded.  Using common sense and having manners does not constitute a "random act of kindness".  And since when did reading out tweets and texts on-air become relevant reporting?  No one gives a crap that Stephanie is stuck on the expressway with thousands of other drivers!  There's no content in that!  Listening to people calling in asking to be dug out of their cars (seriously!) because they're tax-payers takes fatuous to a new height, and the caller who suggested that richer neighbourhoods be cleared before lower-income neighbourhoods because "executives need to take care of business" deserves to have his Blackberry shoved (sideways!) where the sun doesn't shine.  What an entitled prick!

Clearly, this Luddite is not made for main-stream radio any more.  I'm sure there's a rock somewhere with my name on it that I can crawl under.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty happy I don't have to go any further than the wood shed today, either.

Sloche and Donuts

The above screen-cap was the radar image on Tuesday, December 18th at 6:40 AM, for the record.  Just looking at it on the laptop that morning, I knew I'd be in for a wild commute to work.

"Sloche" is a popular Quebecois drink that is essentially a Slush Puppy branded under a different name for the primarily French market here in Quebec.  One of their most popular flavours is "Winchire Wacheur", a crazy blue frozen concoction that resembles its namesake, windshield washer fluid.   To say we're obsessed with slush is an understatement.  When we're not driving or walking through it in winter, we're drinking it in summer, in a toxic blue shade made to resemble windshield washer fluid, no less.

It had been snowing for the better part of the night already, and the forecast called for a snowy day ahead with about 20 cms or nearly 8" of white crap falling.  Like the Inuit, who apparently have a dozen different words for snow, we also call this kind of snow "heart attack snow", because shoveling it could cause a coronary, it's that heavy.  It was hovering just around the freezing mark, yet we'd rather see heart-attack snow falling than having to deal with freezing rain. 

Just as I had suspected, the roads were a horrendous mess as I made my way to work.  I decided to take the back roads because that route provides me with more options than the highway, and what normally takes exactly 22 minutes (why, yes, I do have it down to an exact science), my drive took well over an hour that morning.  Since I have a new (albeit used) car with nice Toyo winter tires, the empty parking of the post office proved too tempting to resist as I threw the last of my Christmas cards into the mailbox.  I tried out a few defensive driving manoeuvers by making a few donuts in the parking lot and finding the sweet spot the ABS decides it wants to kick in at.  It's always a good idea to know what your car can - and more importantly - cannot do in crappy weather and on crappy roads, both of which we have in spades.  Might as well try things out in an empty, slippery parking lot rather than experience them first-hand by careening into someone, or driving into a snow bank.

That out of the way, I needed to take one long detour because a school bus managed to strand itself on a hill, and finally, back on my regularly scheduled road, I came across yet another school bus who also managed to get stuck:

Having spent what seems like a quarter of my childhood on a school bus, I'm eternally grateful I have my own set of wheels.  And the above photo proves my point.  Snow plow?  What snow plow?  And sanding trucks?  No sanding trucks here, either.  For the record, this road is normally well-maintained, even during the worst weather which is why it's my route of choice when it snows.

When I finally made it into work, the power went off within a half an hour, and only came back on again 3 hours later.  We're no fools though, and called around town to find a restaurant that had power and a liquor license, just to make sure all of our bases were covered.  We were settled in and toasting each other happy holidays, all before 11 o'clock in the morning.  Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

I captured a shot of this black squirrel making his way along the snow-packed hydro lines.  He was bounding along on top of the snow, and it was hilarious to watch him go back and forth in leaps and bounds.  I actually think he might have scared himself more than a few times.

There were huge pine branches down all over the place, snapped off by the heavy snow, and the lights flickered off and on all afternoon.

Driving home that night, this is how the road to our house looked:

By the accumulation of snow, no plow had been by here in a good long while.  And if you're wondering what that crap is on my windshield, why, it's the snow that formed a near-glacier on the roof of my car that I could not remove for the life of me, but finally slid forward as I stopped on an incline.  It's a typical occurrence during winter, and the reason I keep spare wipers in the car.  I passed so many people stuck in the snow banks at the end of their driveways that I almost dreaded coming home, but our snow removal contractor had come by already so at least the last 150 feet of my commute was OK.  He's getting an extra-big batch of cookies from me this Christmas. 

And those huge light standards on the new Highway 30?  Someone knocked one down during the storm, and the light standard managed to fall across all 4 lanes of traffic, effectively closing the highway in both directions for several hours.  You think maybe they really ARE too high?  That said and done, Eric took the new highway and bridge to the south shore right after the worst of the snow fell.  He said the off-and-on ramps were sheer ice, which proves my point that snow removal crews were caught off-guard.  His destination normally takes 1.5 hours, and using the new highway, it took 45 minutes.  One day, we might get it together in this infernal province...

Any day now, Environment Canada can take down the dire green tag on their website that says, "Chance of a Green Christmas?"


It'll be a white Christmas, after all.  Slush and donuts included.

Industrial Snowblowing

A comment on one of my previous posts about snow removal in this area got me thinking about Quebec, and Canada, and misconceptions that others might have about our geography and way of life.

I remember visiting Germany and attending school with one of my girlfriends for the day.  It might have been 5th or 6th grade, and when geography class rolled around, I was grilled on the Canadian way of life.  I remember other kids asking me if I had to go to school on a skidoo (no!) and if there were polar bears in my neighbourhood (no!). There are many myths about Canada and the scope of our vast country, and I have always marveled at relatives who came to visit from Europe, asking if we could drive from Montreal to Niagara Falls for the day (no!), and if they could go bear-hunting in our backyard (I think you know the answer to that one already!)

Obviously, many myths are perpetuated about our winters, about how prohibitively cold and snowy they are.  I think New York City has had more snow than Montreal this winter, and even though that could change by say, March, or even next week, we're getting off easy so far this year.  Snowmobile season barely started when we had a big thaw, and the field you see in the distance is not even completely covered by snow.  Nonetheless, snow plows come by regularly to keep the blowing snow in check.

Our wake-up call this morning was provided by the snow-blower above.  Even if there is no snow fall, we get a lot of snow drifting when then wind conditions are right.  The snow-blower pushes the snow about 20 feet in our neighbour's field (when I say neighbour, I mean the farmer who lives at the other end of the field, about one kilometre away.  This is Quebec, after all, where the long lot land system was in full-force, but that's another story for another day).  The idea is that the snow barrier will provide a wind-break, and allow the snow drifts to form somewhere other than the road.  I can only remember one year that the snow was so high at the side of the road, that driving down our street became like driving into a snow tunnel.

Truth be told, we have a harder time driving down our own driveway than we do driving on local roads for the most part.  We have a snow-removal contractor (rodeo cowboy in summer, snow-removal contractor by winter) whose cell number is written on the blackboard in the kitchen.  We get great service from him, and there's always something extremely satisfying about watching him blow the snow from our driveway, while we're warm inside, hands wrapped around a steaming cup of tea.  Sadistic, I know, but there you have it.  Calling work and declaring you'll be late because you're waiting for the snow removal tractor to come is a valid excuse.  I should know, I use it all the time...

Joking aside, I can remember only a handful of occasions where I didn't make it to work because of the snow.  Once, I was stuck in traffic, literally plowing through snow drifts that were as high as my bumper.  I had a snow plow stuck beside me, and we were all at a stand-still.  I watched as the snow-plow driver stood on the step of his truck, and cleared the snow off his windshield wipers because they weren't keeping up.  I got off at the next exit, and drove home.  Now, I don't consider myself a quitter, but that experience taught me to quit while I'm ahead.  I don't work in essential services, so I simply turn the alarm off and pull the covers over my head and sleep in during a big snow storm.

Likewise, I work for a civilized company that values the safety of its employees.  If we gauge a snowfall as serious enough, we close the office and everyone goes home.  These days, with weather radar, it's pretty easy to tell what's going to be a major snowfall, and what's going to amount to a few flurries, although Environment Canada's been caught with their pants down a few times already this season.  We had "2 to 4" centimetres forecast in early December that turned into 40 centimetres by the time the storm ended two days later, and this proverbial "2 to 4" has become a running gag with us this season.  It can be a virtual white-out outside, and when someone asks how much snow is in the forecast, the invariable answer is..."2 to 4".

The weather is almost always on our mind.  Most Canadians I know will first ask how you are, and then launch into a commentary about the weather.  It's as much a part of us, like the polar bears, skidoos, and Tim Horton's, eh?