Winter Wonderland

We’re beyond the first snow now and things have certainly turned our world white. We must have had another 6 inches of snow over the weekend, which is both fun and frustrating.
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I came home from Banff last weekend to shovel about 6 inches of snow off the driveway but over this last weekend, must have done the job 3 times. This morning there was another couple of inches on the drive and I had to just ignore it and leave for work. I’ll have to do it when I get home.

Mowing the lawn used to be one of those things that I’d get sick of having to do every 2 weeks at home, so I know by the time that winter’s over I’ll be well and truly past the whole drive and footpath shoveling thing.

Of course there are positives to all these things as well. I still find it simply amazing to gaze out the front window and see the world all white. It is surely the biggest reminder of just how far we’ve come from home. And the snow is fun.

One of the things that I’ve started to do is turn the deck that adorns the side of the house into a sled ramp for the kids. They commenced in a small way, but if you’ve seen the sand castle that I decided to build earlier in this blog, you’ll understand how the engineer in me needs it to be bigger and better. It’s a pity that the end point for the run happens to be a mesh wire fence. I guess as winter continues and I manage to make this thing bigger, I’m going to have to do something about that. It’s one thing to go sliding into a snow drift, or up a small ramp that slows your speed and something else entirely to come to a sudden halt in a mesh fence!

Yesterday I took the kids to a small hill near our house, plastic toboggans and magic carpet in tow and we spent a fun half hour trudging up and sliding back down the hill. I can’t wait until the local ski hill opens. Apparently that have a tube run there where you slide down in a big inner tube and then get hauled back up the hill again. Sounds cool.

And of course, there’s always the debunking of the ‘Hollywood Myth’ when you get to go somewhere and you’re only expectations have been set by what you’ve seen on TV. For instance, when you see snowy scenes on TV, the roads are all crappy brown. They sure as hell are here. In order to assist in providing traction for vehicles, they first plough the snow out of the way and then they put down grit. And it’s dirty brown. So whilst you can gaze out of the window of the car and watch the winter wonderland pass by, stretching in front of and behind you is a dirty brown streak that likes to get thrown up and adhere to the car. I can’t see much cleaning of cars going on in the next couple of weeks, other than to kick the frozen mud and ice off the mud flaps perhaps!