Markus’ Blog

Seems like Vancouver can’t get enough snow this season. The Lower Mainland is, yet again, covered in a white blanket. Not even two months ago it looked like this and we’re back there now. There have been little interludes of snow between the first big snowfall and now, as well.

The rules of snow here are:

• Vancouver never gets snow as early as November.
• Vancouver never gets snow several times during a season.
• Snow never sticks around except for a few hours, maybe a day.

There’s just a tiny, little problem with these rules. Every single one has been broken this season.

On the other hand, there’s Austria. They would like snow. Lots of it (in some parts anyways). However, they are experiencing the mildest winter ever. It is not unusual for Vienna to not get a lot of snow. It is unusual if the daytime highs approach or even exceed 10°C — and not just for a day or two. It is also unusual for the Western provinces to not have any snow at all. Innsbruck, for instance, is forcast 6°C for Friday and 9°C for Sunday. Apparently it is so bad that pollen are in the air already.

And, of course, Tourism Austria is not happy at the lack af snow at all. It’s pretty bad for the economy.

Crazy stuff!

We did some work on our condo today. Minor stuff, but still big, because neither of us is used to doing “handy” stuff around the house.

We put up a towel holder.

And hooks for robes. The first one worked nicely, drlling holes for the second hook, though, we hit a concrete pillar (hidden behind dry wall), so we couldn’t drill a hole deep enough for the screws to fit.

Means we have to go out and buy shorter anchors and screws and try using those. Bloody hell. If that doesn’t work, we have to fill the holes, re-paint and drill new ones. Fun.

Then we went on to hang up our key holder. We wanted it next to the breaker box, but didn’t want to risk drilling holes so close to wires. We decided to go for the opposite wall instead.

Funny thing is: we hit concrete again. So we said “screw it” and tried drilling holes next to the breaker box. That worked, at least well enough. No issues with the first hole and the second hole was almost deep enough before we hit concrete there again. The screw would fit, but the anchor was too long, so we simply cut the anchor and screwed the key hooks on anyways.

Now the key hooks are in the place we wanted them, but we definitely have two holes we have to fill and paint over.

Fun stuff doing work on your condo. Especially if you don’t have any previous experience and you end up with nice surprises like concrete pillars where you had no idea there were any.

Afterwards, I went for a nice walk in the snow to get some fresh air and stretch my legs. There’s a lot of that white stuff out there right now. It’s been snowing constantly for over 24 hours at this point. I took some pictures of the neighbourhood.

That’s the hedge by our rear driveway.

That’s 31^st or 32^nd Avenue. Can’t remember which — and I don’t know the area that well yet.

That’s a whole lot of snow on these branches, don’t you think?

Vancouver does have snowplows. lol Even if it’s not very many (for a city of its size): 27 according to their home-page. This is King Edward Ave.

That’s Mountain View Cemetery.

More of Mountain View Cemetery in the snow.

That’s our building, which means I had made it back home by that point.

Unusually early we got snow this year. Normally it doesn’t snow in Vancouver till late December or January, if at all. They were predicting snowfall starting this weekend and a drastic drop in temperature. And they were right. It started snowing lightly early afternoon and now, at five o’clock, it’s snowing quite hard and the snow actually sticks on the grass and on parked cars. The roads are still just wet.

That’s how it looks from our window right now. There’s going to be more snow tomorrow as it looks like. And we might just take the kitty outside to enjoy the snow, ’cause she sure likes it.

That’s the snowflakes. That picture was an accident. The flash was on and I didn’t realize it. I wasn’t expecting it to turn out at all, let alone that nicely.

Apparently it’s been raining so hard and so much in such a short period of time that Greater Vancouver’s (and some of Vancouver Island’s) water supply got contaminated with unclean water.

Tap water has been brown and cloudy since the storm and could cause gastrointestinal illness, medical health officers said. [...] Residents are being advised to use bottled water or to boil tap water for a full minute before drinking, brushing teeth or washing food. Water should be boiled and allowed to cool before being put in another container or refrigerated.

More on CBC.

Yes, indeed. The suff that’s coming out of our pipes right now is pretty yellowish-brown and has a definite earthy, muddy smell to it. This is my first time ever being personally affected by nasty weather. Yep, even this little inconvenience is more than I’ve ever had to deal with before. So far, the side effects of storms, rain and other nasty weather have been something I watched on TV only.

Of course pretty much every single store is sold out of bottled water now. Mostly because people buy in bulk (completely unnecessarily, of course), as if there was no hope stores would ever get new shipments of bottled, clean water. Sure they will, it’s not like the roads were all washed away or the economy was destroyed or something.

I don’t like it very much when people “panic” in this weird way and start acting all irrationally.