It's a Snow Day!

The city is buried under a blanket of thick, white snow. You'll be better off getting around on skis than trying to drive anywhere. According to the CBC, city buses are running but aren't on schedule at all -- no one can find out more details than that.

Classes at the University of Regina and SIAST are cancelled. Regina Public Schools and Regina Catholic Schools buses are not running but their schools are open.

This would all be rather exciting but now that I work from home, some of the snow day excitement is lost on me. Maybe I'll go outside and try to get stuck in a drift or something?

Note: the photo above is not a mistake, it is an actual shot of the view out my window. If you look closely you can just make out the back end of a polar bear.

Windchill Warning

It’s minus 14, but with the wind chill it feels like minus 24.What if you don’t go out? How does it feel then? It feels like you should get a real job, that’s how it feels. It’s minus 28 outside, but it feels like you are blessed, because your old boiler is working its heart out, it thinks this weather is just dandy. Your apartment is so hot that you open a window and suck in the cold thin air through your nose. You are outside in the stillness of minus 43, but you feel like you are on the moon. You wonder what it’s like to be dead. It’s minus 27, but it feels like you haven’t done your creative work this winter, again, and soon you won’t have the cold to keep you in, pinned to your desk. It’s minus 9, and yes it does feel like minus 25, because you’re not smart enough to dress warmly enough unless it’s minus 25. Other days the conditions can be exactly the same, but you feel like a winter animal, something fat, a seal or a polar bear, happy as a clam and warm right down to your tootsies. It’s minus 20, but it feels like a normal, pre-climate change winter, and for that you are grateful. It’s minus 21, but the sun is coming up so much earlier now, you’re not sure you can face another spring, you just had summer, it seems. Time goes so much faster when you get older. It’s minus 22 and the conditions are perfect for the creation of crystals in the snow. There are diamonds everywhere you look and you wonder why this wasn’t on the weather report, like “Severe Risk of Wonder,” and jokesy admonitions like “Boy it’s looking pretty magical out there folks, better take care out there, don’t want you to get hurt in any flights of fancy.” It’s minus 27, but the rabbits love it, sitting in silent contemplation of the moonrise. You and the rabbits feel gypped: some stupid groundhog somewhere has said that winter is almost over. If it’s true, the rabbits will have to start changing into their spring pyjamas. You will just have to cope with the absence of cold, the promise of spring. It’s minus 33, and you wonder why they keep telling you how you feel, how they never even come close.

(photo depicts a Regina bunny in warmer times)

Not So Cold

Further to my whining posts yesterday, it is no longer colder than crap outside. It is, in fact, not bad. Minus 11, -20 w/ windchill. Better.

Also, better is this second cup of coffee. My first tasted a little too desperate or something. Mmm. Sequel-coffee.

Six In The Morning (Deadline Edition)

A half dozen things you need to know about right now. RIGHT...NOW!!!

1.) IT'S COLD! -28.8 degrees C, and completely horrible. Make that -41 with the windchill.

2.) BUDGET DAY The drama explodes like a birthday cake stuffed with dynamite starting at three this afternoon (Eastern, so that's what, two here?). Will Iggy's Grits let Harper and company's budget pass? Will Jack Layton go all Die Hard With A Vengeance in the House of Commons? Will Gilles Duceppe be smugly inscrutable? Follow the excitement here or here or here or here.

3.) IT'S COLD!

4.) IT'S COLD!

5.) DEADLINE DAY It's Tuesday, the day prairie dog goes to press. There's sure a lot of work to do.

6.) IT'S COLD! Cold! Cold! Cold!!!