I am overcome by the amount of snow that is blanketing my near vicinity. Seriously, outside of ski resorts I've not seen this sort of thing since I was a kid in Germany. I'm beginning to feel a bit oppressed, you know, these four, um, five, uh, okay six - possibly twelve walls depending on which room I'm in... Whoever built this house apparently declared war on the right angle. I strongly suspect some of the interior to have been lined out by eye. Darn good eye, though, it all fits together really quite well, but just this simple upstairs bedroom sports nine walls. Or sixteen, depends on how you count. However many there are, they all keep the snow out quite handily.
Current temp is reputed to be -5°C, which translates to bitingly cold, at the least. Somewhere around 20°F is my guess, and lo! my guess is not bad, the weather report thingie I wrote translates the Fahrenheit as 23. They have it a lot worse in the Antarctic, or so I hear.
Still, I am right this very moment, on the second floor of this house, about one and a half football fields above sea level. There's a skookum landmass just to the west, and a sodding continent just to the east. There should not be anything like this mass of snow all over the place.
On the plus side, Cardhu is thrilled.
In other happy news, my mom's plane did finally land in Vancouver this evening. Early last summer, she'd scheduled connections that had her picking up a prop plane from Vancouver to Nanaimo, pretty much as soon as her plane from Dallas grounded in Vancouver, with plenty of time to clear C&I. Word last week came to the effect that the Vanc->Nanaimo flight she booked was cancelled and so she was shunted off to a later one. Well, what with one thing and another we all decided she should punt that leg of the journey entirely, and they could either not charge her or charge her for the ticket price, however their arcane regs demanded. She wanted a shopping spree on Granville Island, as opposed to wandering the corridors of YVR for five hours, so we made reservations at a hotel on that side and planned to ferry her over next day.
At pig's hours this morning, their regs demanded that she not only pay for a plane ride from Vancouver to Nanaimo, whenever it should please their nibs to present her with a plane on a runway, but also that she must physically sit her bum down on a seat on that hypothetical plane. They wouldn't take the experience as read; unless she was visibly right there, irritation and considerable luggage in tow, they'd take it upon themselves to cancel her return reservations.
All of which she was put to communicating to Nola (currently in Burnaby with the car) and me (currently snowbound here on Gabriola without so much as a golf cart to my transportation credit) at around 5:30 this morning.
It's just another example of security theatre; she couldn't even pay for a seat on a plane no longer needed, she actually had to present her person ready to board, and this despite the airline's cancelling the flight she'd contracted for.
In some strange fashion, this all makes us joy in the instance of fog in Dallas. Fog delayed the take-off of that plane from Dallas to Vancouver to the point where any connections to Nanaimo were indeed moot. So she's had a simply horrid day of travel that started at least sixteen hours ago, but she's now settled in a nice hotel room on Granville as planned and doesn't have to try for any leftover commutes to Nanaimo in the dark of the evening.
There's still loads to do before she gets here, much of which would be so much easier if there weren't so much snow on the ground and chill in the air, but, well, hell. It'll get done, or we'll manage. What really matters is that we're all safe and sound, and it's a bonus that we have all this snow to play with.
