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The snow keeps falling … and I’m going on strike

January 3rd, 2009 · 14 Comments

Okay, it’s Saturday morning, we’re at Day 22 of snow in Vancouver, it’s snowing again and I’ve definitely had it. (The record, btw, is 33 days in 64/65. Our first snowfall landed Dec. 13.)

I like snow and I’m not a complainer. (The last few weeks have brought home to me, once again, the reality that some people are in a state of perpetual outrage and others are not — and that I’m in category 2.) So I’m not one of those people who has rushed to trash various government agencies for not shovelling my steps, not making the snow disappear, not ploughing my Siberia-like side street (I can’t see how they could even get a plough in, honestly) or whatever. But this is definitely starting to be not fun.

Besides the fact that our backyard is slowly filling up with bags of uncollected garbage and recycling, I’ve noticed in the last few days that my knees hurt and I’ve got various pulled muscles, the kind of feeling I usually get when Ive been cross-country skiing for a couple of hours. I finally realized that’s the result of constantly walking around on piles of snow or on ice-covered sidewalks, where every step requires that you brace yourself to start sliding or skating.

If that’s how I, a relatively young and healthy person feels, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be 70 or 80 and trying to get out for enough groceries to stay alive. I personally am at the point where I feel like going on strike, refusing to leave the house until the snow melts. We’ve got a tonne of stuff in the cupboards, various weird cans of things I’ve bought over the years that are now just taking up a lot of space, not to mention my somewhat stale Christmas baking and a giant clamshell of grapes I got at Costco yesterday, so we could probably survive here for at least a couple of weeks. By then, surely, the rain will come.

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