Tag Archives: weather

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!

Shovelling Snow

I remember I time when I didn’t know what snow was. Sure, I’d seen it on TV, but it didn’t make any sense. I grew up on a tropical island and a party-sized block of ice was the largest concept I had for something cold that didn’t sit inside of a fridge or freezer.

My first snowfall (except for a spattering of sleet) was a cartoonishly slow snowfall of giant flakes that made me question how real the world was.

That was Grade 5. By Grade 9 I was absolutely done with snow and knew I was not going to live in Toronto the rest of my life. When I came to Vancouver as a water polo coach in ’93, I knew that I was going to move here, and leave Toronto and the snow behind.

Well, I didn’t quite leave it behind, and this morning I was shovelling my driveway (for the third day in a row) before 6am. But it was quite enjoyable. I had my headphones in, listening to a book, the only other sound being my shovel against the driveway. At one point my mind drifted to what I was actually doing:

Snow falls and gets in the way of our daily living. We take shovels and move it aside. It then melts away, with no indication that it was ever there. Snow falls…

I’m reminded of this silly gif of a man shovelling water and tossing back into the same puddle.

I’m also reminded of how we are at the whim of nature. This year in BC we’ve had forest fires and torrential rains that have completely affected our lives with road closures and damaged homes, even loss of life. The raw power of the natural forces around us is incredible.

And, in this part of the world, we have snow. White fluffy stuff that falls and gets in our way. Sometimes, like the fires and floods, it can wreak havoc, other times it is a mild inconvenience… and we scurry around moving it out of the way with shovels, then we watch it melt away.

Fall colours

I just came back from a walk with my daughter. We passed this tree and I had to stop and take a photo:

Growing up in the Caribbean, I have to say that the explosion of fall colours was as captivating as experiencing snow for the first time. We moved to Toronto (North York) and the main highway downtown is the Don Valley Parkway, which follows the Don River lowlands and is surrounded by trees. This time of year the drive is breathtaking.

Seeing this tree brought back memories of seeing fall leaves for the first time and thinking that there was no way these colours were from real trees. It’s amazing that so many vibrant colours can stem from the death of leaves. Fall is here, enjoy the weather, and beautiful scenery, because winter is coming.

Here comes the rain

It’s dumping outside this morning. That will happen when you live on the edge of a rain forest. It will happen a lot more as we creep into November, which is probably the wettest month in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, or maybe that’s February? The point is, we are heading into a whole lot of wet in the next while.

But today I have a walk up the Coquitlam Crunch trail planned with a friend, and we have a goal to do this trail once a week, at least 34 times, this school year. Today will be #3.

That will mean a lot of hikes in the rain. While it’s less than 30 minutes to the top, it’s almost an hour long. That’s long enough that if you aren’t dressed appropriately you are going to get soggy and cold. And I hate being cold!

So, I’ll bundle up, get sweaty in too many layers, and be happy to be outside with my buddy. Because when you live where we live, you either go outside and get wet, or you coop yourself up inside for several months of the year. It’s time to get wet…