I'm not much of a winter person, which is the reason we no longer live in the beautiful northern part of British Columbia, where you get "eight months of winter and four months of tough sledding." But let's face it, if you live in Canada, you're going to see snow at least once a year.
The west coast is sure getting walloped with the white stuff this month - BC, Washington and Oregon. Way more snow than I need to see! Now that I'm retired, at least I don't have to drive in it if I don't want to, but we still need to keep our driveway clear in case we want to ... say ... go to the grocery store and such.
I've shovelled it three times in the past two days because it's easier to shovel three or four inches at a time than to wait and shovel 10 inches at once. A lot of people around here don't shovel. They count on it melting before they need to get out of their driveway, but that doesn't always happen. Many of them also drive pickup trucks, so they can drive over anything.
The southwestern part of the province - Vancouver and the surrounding cities - which we call the Lower Mainland, sure got a huge dump of snow last week. They're measuring it in feet, not inches, and they're all quite traumatized. They aren't used to seeing that much, and the cities aren't equipped to deal with it, either. On top of it all, they had freezing rain last night and all of the main highways connecting the Lower Mainland to every other part of the province were closed, leaving travellers stranded. Oh, the joys of winter!
The sun came out this morning, so I grabbed my camera and headed to the backyard for some pictures. Fresh snow does look pretty, I'll admit. And the temperature rose to above zero Celsius this afternoon, which means that it's been melting. It's supposed to be getting warmer tomorrow and the day after, so I'm expecting it to be all gone by the end of next week. I am beyond tired of shovelling snow and freezing my hands! On the other hand, I'm spending lots of time at my sewing machine.
Still, I'd rather be spending time in my garden. I've ordered all of my vegetable seeds and I keep looking out the window for signs of Spring. I know that my Snowdrops are sitting under a pile of snow, waiting for that first encouraging ray of sunshine to spring out of the ground. They're always blooming by the last week of February.
So, enough of Winter. Hello Spring! Until next time,
Wendy
