Pure and Driven

It snowed here in Vancouver yesterday, and again today. Two days of snow was enough to make the entire city grind to a standstill, with massive disruptions to buses, trains, traffic and agen-Dazs outlets all over the city. One would think that every Canadian is given extensive childhood training in all matters icy and blizzardic, but snow is relatively rare here in Vancouver. The locals tend to slip over and land on their butts just as much as us imports, which is good for the ego, although still quite hard on the butt. Personally, I think snow is magic stuff, fallen from heaven like fluffy white angel feathers. Drawing back the morning curtains to see the world draped in a thick white blanket makes me happy as a clam - a clam sucking down buckets of plankton on a balmy island reef though, not a clam in a hungry Italian's linguine marinara.

Vancouver's first snow for 2005 was wet and heavy, and tended to blat down slantwise instead of floating down softly. There certainly was lots of it though, and it quickly turned the buses on my route into slow-moving, smoking piles of mobile debris. I decided I couldn't be buggered waiting around like a frozen fish stick, so I pulled on my extra-woolly undies and walked to the city. This proved to be both a clever and stupid decision. Clever in that I got to work in about half an hour, far faster than if I'd waited for an uncrowded bus, but stupid in that it was cold, wet, slippery, windy and miserable. I did get a few neat pictures as the flailing crosswinds did their best to blow me off the Burrard Bridge into the sea, so I'll post them somewhere in a few days' time.

Today's snow was the stuff of fairy tales, light fluffy flakes falling gently from sky, dancing on every puff of wind and tumbling in the wake of every slowly skidding Kitsilano minivan. I really wanted to skip work and just wander about it, grinning like a fool, but bills must be paid, lift tickets must be purchased and anti-inflammatory drugs must be stockpiled. The super thing was that snow was still drifting down in the evening, and is still falling steadily now (1:30am). It bodes well for a possible Cypress Mountain snowboard outing this weekend, and for snow angels tomorrow morning on the front lawn.