♀ & I live on the Canadian west coast or as it’s often referred to, the ’wet’ coast. It rains here and during the winter it rains here a lot. Picture rain of biblical proportions. Seriously, 40 days and 40 nights is not that unusual. However, I don’t mind the rain and let me tell you why. You never need to shovel it. I grew up 400km inland and winter there means snow and cold and frozen pipes and icicles big enough to pull off eaves troughs. Do you remember an Agatha Christie novel where a huge icicle was the murder weapon? Anyway, in the 25 years I’ve lived on the coast I’ve never bought snow tires. Most winters there are only a few ‘snow days’ and all season tires are just fine. There have even been a few wonderful winters where I didn’t see a single snowflake.

We had a show shovel when we lived in the townhouse, but I in my infinite wisdom, decided we should leave it for the pretty young woman who was buying our house. What possible reason, I asked ♀ when she said we should take the shovel,  would we need a snow shovel on the 2nd floor of an apartment building? Sure we only have one underground parking stall, but I was certain we would find someone in the building willing to rent us a second stall.

We are now well into our 4th week of snow and I know that none of you who deal with snowy winters every year will have any sympathy at all, but this hasn’t been a lot of fun. We haven’t been able to procure a second underground parking stall and even though my Mini (Cooper that is) is just fine on slippery roads, it’s very low to the ground and if I park on the street and a snowplow comes along…I’m knackered. On Boxing Day we managed to get both our cars stuck and because I’d given our snow shovel away and none of the stores that were open and within walking distance had any, we had to resort to digging her car out with a plastic dust pan. Oh sure, I hear you laughing.

One of the worst thing about 4 weeks of snow is that there are a lot of people here that don’t know how to drive in it. They either drive waaaay to slow or they don’t slow down at all.  I saw a Hummer in the ditch yesterday and yeah, I laughed…actually I honked my horn and waved. The thing is, if there’s only a few ‘snow days’ a certain percentage of the truly awful drivers just don’t drive, but now they’re all out on the roads and it’s scary. The other crappy thing is, when it stops snowing we’re still in for another 3 months of rain and when it starts the storm drains will be blocked with ice and snow and boy-oh-boy it’s going to be messy.

So after digging her car out with a plastic dust pan…quit laughing, it’s not that funny, ♀ found a snow shovel. A $30 snow shovel! You would think that after spending that much money on a shovel, we wouldn’t see another snowflake…ever!  But no, it’s snowed quite a bit since then. We haven’t need to use it to dig a car out yet. However, we’ve needed to use it on our deck. Even though it’s covered, the wind blows the snow in and when it melts it could damage the unit below us.

So do you want to see what a $30 dollar snow shovel looks like?

cheers,

♀ & sss