Tag Archives: weather

wind and waves

If you ask most people what causes waves they will tell you the gravitational pull of the moon. While that is the reason for the tides, the most common cause of waves is… wind. On my hike yesterday it was quite windy and I got to see the wind ‘playing’ on the surface of the water.

I also remember seeing dust devils, mini tornados, on my many adventures through the southern states with my dad. And I once saw a water spout off the coast of Jeju Island in Korea. 

It’s fascinating to see the power of the wind. Harnessed, it can generate power. It can also be devastatingly destructive.

But looking at the way wind travels along the surface of water, creating waves, is mesmerizing. I love to watch it dance and control the water, with the wind taking the lead and the water following along at the leader’s whim. But to say the water is ‘following’ the wind is a misnomer.

animation of people doing the stadium wave

animation of a longitudinal displacement wave pulse traveling through a tube filled with molecules

Like fans doing the wave in a stadium, the water itself does not travel with the wind, but rather as a disturbance traveling through the water. A beautiful disturbance. A dance of wind and waves. In a way, tides and waves are the dance of the sun and moon. The moon influences the tides and the sun unevenly heats the earth creating wind. So the dance of wind on water is a dance of sun and moon, of heat and gravity, of power and beauty.

Wacky weather

I’m back in Vancouver and went for my 8am walk with my buddy, Dave, up the Coquitlam Crunch this morning. It was slushy midway up and snowing at the top. Later in the day it snowed at my house.

Now, at shortly after 5pm, it’s gorgeous, sunny, and warm. It’s a beautiful spring day. That’s what you get in the Pacific North West near the mountains.

There are days when I’m scraping the frost off of my car in the morning, windshield wipers are going full speed at lunch due to rain, and I’ve got the air conditioner on or windows down in the late afternoon. I’m don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this wacky weather, it’s like experiencing completely different days within one day. It’s just wacky!

Online rather than cancelled

It started to snow massive snowflakes just before 3pm. I looked at the forecast and after a lull at 5pm there was a good chance of the snow continuing to fall for a few hours. Our school is at the lowest end of the city, not far from the Fraser River, and so when it’s snowing here, it’s a lot worse elsewhere… including at my house only 3.5 kilometres away.

We had a Parent Advisory Council (PAC) meeting scheduled for 7pm. I called my PAC Chair and she and I decided to move the meeting online, rather than hybrid as we’ve offered the rest of this year.

I sent a quick email out and we made the switch. Turnout was similar to when we have the meeting blended… and no one had to drive in our hilly city where snow ploughing doesn’t always happen in a timely manner. As it turned out, the snow wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and we probably could have held the meeting at the school. However, it could easily have been bad enough to cause issues for parents coming to and leaving the meeting.

Five years ago we would have either kept the meeting as planned with a poor turnout, or postponed the meeting. The idea of hosting the meeting online would not have been something we would have considered. But last night it was ‘business as usual’ with a full agenda and everyone meeting from the comfort or their homes.

A few weeks back I was in a meeting that someone was stuck in traffic for, and he listened in from his car. Before that, I was home with a bad cough, and was still able to join in remotely for a meeting that I really wanted to attend. It’s interesting how practices can change in a relatively short time. This can also have negative consequences, like expecting someone to join a meeting remotely even when sick or on vacation (not just by expectation, but also from a sense of obligation). But it can also be extremely convenient, saving hours of transportation time. I’m running a meeting on Friday and while 12 principals from across the province will be meeting at my school, most will come from nearby, and another 8 will join us online, saving themselves from ferry and plane trips, or from very long drives.

There is real value in meeting face-to-face and online meetings can be void of that connection you have in a physical meeting… but the convenience of meeting online is pretty amazing, and when it comes to things like inclement weather, a switch to remote instead of cancelling is a pretty good option!

Chilly outside

I really don’t like the cold. I am the Caribbean kid who used to get out of the ocean when it started raining because the sun was covered by a cloud and the ocean was too chilly for me. I need to warm tap water up to rinse my mouth out after brushing my teeth. I sleep with a toque on because my head gets chilled.

There is a cold streak here and I just want to spend the day under the covers. I won’t have to spend much time outside, basically just getting to and from the car and that’s already feeling like too much. Yes, I’m whining. No, it’s not that bad. But sometimes I wish I’d never left Barbados. Or that I came to Canada much younger so that I wouldn’t know anything different.

I’ll bundle up. I’ll brave the cold. I’ll remind myself that it really doesn’t get too cold here compared to other parts of the country… but I’ll also whine a bit. ‘Baby it’s cold outside’. And I don’t like it.

Snow dump

It amazes me how a big snowfall can shut down the Vancouver Lower Mainland. My parents were visiting and returning to Toronto last night, and while many flights were cancelled, theirs was just delayed an hour. That meant that last night after shovelling my driveway for an hour I got to sit in traffic all the way to the airport and back.

I saw cars parked sideways, stuck on medians, and stuck on hills. I was detoured by a fireman then followed a set of cars into an alley that was too steep for the car 3 ahead of me and had to reverse into another snow-filled alley. And I also ended up waiting 6 lights to turn left at an intersection on the way home.

It’s not like the weather was unexpected, yet it seems local drivers were caught unprepared. It happens at least once every year here. This region never seems prepared for large volumes of snow. Drivers seem to think they are better in the snow than they are, and people get stranded and cause major delays. It’s a winter ritual, and while I usually avoid most of it, being fortunate to live very close to my work, last night I got to see the chaos of ill-equipped cars without snow tires, and ill-experienced drivers without common sense first hand.

Hopefully most of the roads are clear this morning, and people take it easy on their way to work and schools. Be safe out there!

Temperature drop

Well, it’s time to start wearing my long underwear again. The temperature has dropped dramatically and the cold damp rain is seeping into me. I have learned over the years that when the days start getting shorter and I’m both heading to work and leaving from work in the dark, it’s time to layer up my clothing.

Vancouver is a damp kind of cold and it seems to chill me more than the crisp cold of Toronto, although I hated Toronto winters far more than Vancouver ones. Toronto winters sucked the life out of me. Here in Vancouver I am still not a fan of winter but the temperature doesn’t drop as low, even if the kind of chill is different.

Layers and Vitamin D, these are my two remedies for winter. And since I take Vitamin D all year round it’s just the long underwear and extra layers that are the big adjustment this time of year.

For those of you that are not fans of winter, what helps you through?

Soaking up the sun

It’s 3:35 in the afternoon and I’m sitting in my back yard with no shirt on, just soaking up the sun. This is absolutely amazing weather for October in the Vancouver mainland. It looks like this might be the last week of it before the temperature dips. But wow, what fantastic weather we’ve had for the past couple months.

I feel like we deserve this because we had the coldest May and June that I can recall in the last 25+ years of living out here. But the term ‘deserve’ suggests some sort of fairness and weather doesn’t play fair. So I’ll just say that we have been very lucky!

I feel like im dosing up on sunshine before the dole-drums of winter hit. November and February are historically the 2 months I hate living in a northern rainforest. Ahead of us are entire weeks where I won’t know where the sun is during the day. Cloud cover will mask the exact location of the sun and the sun sets before 5pm. December and January aren’t a lot better, but November and February are definitely the wettest and toughest to handle.

But not today. Today the sun feeds me natural Vitamin D, and I bask in the glory of a bright and warm afternoon. Today I charge my batteries for the dark days ahead. I’ll need to remember days like today when the rain comes and feels like it will never leave. And hopefully next year we won’t have to wait so long for the return of this wonderful weather.

Brighter days

It’s so much easier walking up at 5:15am when it’s light out. It’s easier to wake up before my alarm, and there is no need to stumble around in the dark. I love the longer days of summer! We still have 21 days of getting a bit more time with the sun above the horizon.

I didn’t grow up with this in Barbados, where there are no real seasons and the sun would stay out 12-13 hours no matter what time of year it is.

Now I live in Vancouver where daylight will exceed 16 hours in the summer and be under 8.5 hours in the winter. Coming out of winter and moving to these wonderfully long days is so uplifting! It makes me want to just seize the day.

More rain

There hasn’t been a torrential rainfall, in fact it hasn’t rained hard in weeks. But the weather has been cold and damp and yet again it’s drizzling this morning. May has felt as cold and wet as February usually does.

I set up the pool last weekend, and at this point I think it will be a solid month before it’s warm enough to get in. I wore a turtle neck to school on Friday, and I’ll be wearing layers again today. It’s cold.

Part of the price of living in the Vancouver Lower Mainland is that November and February suck… days of endless rain and low temperatures. But May is usually amazing. Sometimes we get to June and it cools down, but May is a month I usually always look forward to. Not this year.

In my 20’s I ran away from Toronto because I hated the winters. Now in my 50’s I’m wondering why I chose to live near a rainforest? I think being born on a tropical island and spending my first decade there spoiled me. I just want to see a bit of sunshine for more than a couple hours at a time… and I really hope I don’t have to wait until July to get it.

Guess I’ll just keep taking my vitamin D pills and bundling up. Summer will get here… eventually.

Let’s be careful out there

For the last couple days the roads have been snowy, icy, and very slippery. My advice to my kids regarding driving in snow is to go slower than they think they need to, and leave more room than they think they need to. With both kids, part of teaching then to drive was having them feel the vibration of ABS breaks, because if you don’t know what that feels like, the initial response to the feeling could be to release the breaks because something feels wrong.

I grew up in a pre-ABS era and was taught to pump the breaks in a slide on ice. The first time I was in a car with ABS breaks, I still pumped when I felt a side, and a friend in the car asked me, “Why are you doing that? The car does it better and faster than you.”

Our city is hilly, and I’ve seen a lot of people skidding and sliding over the past couple days. Most slides that I’ve seen have been little fish tails as people pull out of driveways and make turns. My wife was heading up the big hill to her school yesterday and the person in front was actually going too slow, which can be a problem going up hill, but more likely to get stuck than the idiots who feel their tires slipping and stepping on the gas.

I learned to drive in the snow in Toronto, with some fierce winter weather. My wife grew up in Nelson,BC, where it snows many feet more per year than the Vancouver Lower Mainland. Living here now, we can see the struggles of drivers who have little experience in the snow. It can be a challenging thing when you have experience, much less when you don’t.

So, no matter your skill, caution is probably better than confidence… and today is supposed to be pretty bad out, so be careful out there!