Fury – comma - Nature’s

I wasn’t sure that I was going to make it to the cinema this week, let alone be able to sit through a film and go out for a bite to eat afterward. Not a health problem, but a weather incident! I had two blocks to walk from the bus I took to get to the cinema, but in that two blocks a storm unleashed the totality of its fury on me (and on others around me, I suppose, but who has time to care about others in a personal disaster?!). I had an umbrella, and I managed to keep it under control for the most part (only one inside-out incident and quickly reversed), but you wouldn’t have known it if you saw me arrive at my destination.

In short, the storm threw rain at me from the front almost horizontally for the first part of my journey and then balanced itself with some frontal horizontal rain for the last bit. Inside, I was able to squeeze excess water from the hem of my lengthening-by-the-minute t-shirt several times, without seeming to have an impact on the amount of water I was carry around with me.

It’s surprising how that much water made me look like Jake Gyllenhaal, no? Could I see a movie in such a state? The account I have written of the film (next post) should provide your answer. Just underlining the great personal sacrifice I went through to share my silly thoughts on current movies with you (#firstworldproblems).

But just a couple more weather notes before I move to the next post focused on the film: one of my friends arrived by car and told us that he watched the temperature drop by almost 15° C on his car’s external thermometer in the space of a few minutes. We also continued to hear the massive claps of thunder throughout the film inside the cinema — yikes!

I see from the weather reports that we only got about 22 mm of rain from the storm, but I can tell you exactly where it seems to have landed. I saw that place in the mirror this morning!

Enough whining…back to our regular programming…

Elitist

A horrible realization today as I was waiting for the bus to go home from work. I have become the person I would have accused of insensitivity just a few short years ago.

Yes, it has only been a few years since I got myself a cell phone. This in reaction to having some problems with my land line, which would be too complicated to explain in this short entry. I couldn't be without the means to contact emergency services, and couldn't necessarily count on being able to get to the pay phone up the street.

This is really a story about the pay phone, and how this once ubiquitous creature is disappearing quickly from our urban landscape. Everyone, it seems, has a cell phone and doesn't need a pay phone. This, or course, is the insensitive statement that doesn't take into consideration those in our society who don't have the means to maintain their own cell phones, especially in this land of overpriced telecommunications.

And today I waited in the bus shelter because of the ongoing snowstorm and because I didn't want to be in the wrong place just outside the bus shelter when the accumulated snow would slide of the roof. I wanted to be able to anticipate the arrival of the bus without those snow-filled risks and what do I see?

A rotten phone booth blocking the view! Why is it there? Nobody needs those anymore!

What a horrible person I turned out to be: lost all my concern for the marginalized because of a little snow.

Epilogue: Karma or Poetic Injustice?

This morning, when it was safe for me to go outside and not get guilt-tripped into helping my neighbour shovel out her car, I ventured forth to remove the snow from my stairs. Oh, I was very ready to leave a little patch of snow in front of the door of the neighbours I have been so annoyed with for not taking their turn at shovelling. My cackles of guilty delight (some penance that turned out to be!) soon dissolved into sobs as my evil plot was undone by physics: something about the configuration of my tiny shared front porch incites the wind to remove snow from in front of my neighbours' door and to deposit it in drifts up against mine.

Foiled!

Snow and Etiquette

As we creep closer and closer to the apparent all-time record of snowfall (at least since we stole the continent and started writing these things down), I am seized by the need both to vent and to confess. Venting is way more fun, so I'll start with that.

I, like many others in Montréal, have an outdoor staircase leading to my front door which staircase I share with my upstairs neighbours. Now, it won't make a lot of sense for those who come from elsewhere that this is a city of long winding outdoor staircases, given our winter experiences, but this is apparently a product of a time when the Catholic Church was much more in control of our society. It seems that the Church thought that if staircases leading to different dwellings in this urban setting were indoors, there might be hanky-panky out of the watchful eyes of the neighbours. Keeping the staircases outside mad it much more possible for the neighbours to see, and presumably denounce, anything untoward that might be unfolding in their neighbourhoods.

For several years now, I have noticed that the parade of younger people who have occupied the apartment upstairs from me (who share my staircase) have had the unfortunate inability to wield a shovel and take their turn at clearing the snow and ice from our staircase. That delightful duty, albeit one that generally takes a maximum of 15 minutes in the very worst of conditions, keeps falling to me. They see content to walk on the snowy stairs, compressing our fluffy precipitation into hard-pack and eventually ice, while I, ever concerned about my own welfare and that of our letter-carrier, have to drag myself outside to clear the snow, chip away at the ice and deposit salt to melt what cannot be chipped away.

Now, like I said, this is not a multi-hour task, and it is probably good for me. After many years, however, I start to resent that it is the middle-aged guy with AIDS and arthritis in his hands and feet who has to clear the snow while the younger and more sprightly neighbours reap the benefits. Of course, it would be I and not they who is in greater danger of falling and breaking a hip!

Imagine my delight to arrive home the other day, after a small snowfall, to find that they seemed to have cleared the snow off the stairs, probably with their feet, judging from the quality of the snow removal (being an expert I do get fussy about these things). My delight dissolved into outrage as I reached the top of the stairs: they had cleared the snow from the stairs and from the space immediately in front of their own door, but left several centimetres of snow in front of my door! If I hadn't dutifully cleared snow from in front of their door for EVERY OTHER SNOWFALL this year, I might not have felt so outraged. What's with that?!!

Here I let my rage go and drift into the confession part of this post.

The thing that most amuses me about snowfalls in this city is what it does to personal motor vehicles. That's probably because I don't own one and don't think, in general, that people should own cars in a city with a pretty decent public transit system. Here is my neighbour's car late last night, snowstorm raging and illumination courtesy of the orangey streetlights:

Here's what it looked like this morning, with better light, but more hours of snow and wind and multiple snowplow passages on the street- and sidewalk sides of it:

You will notice that these photos were taken from the same vantage point — safely inside my apartment, looking down on the street scene outside. It seems (here comes the confession) that I can't bring myself to offer to help my neighbour (different neighbour, on the other side) to dig her car out of the snow. I even went so far, a few weeks ago, as to stay inside when I noticed that she was out there digging away to liberate her personal pollution device from the hardened snow that had been plowed up against it. And I must say that she was out there for hours while I guiltily skulked around inside, revising my plans for the day to the point where I cancelled them altogether. (There was no going outside without having to pass by the tired neighbour plugging away at her endless task.)

So why did I do that? Of course, I could justify my (in)action by the aforementioned political point of view that cars do not belong in the city. I could cave and confess that I am just lazy. I could explore my feelings for this neighbour, who has lived here since before I moved in (yikes! 15 years ago!) and had been quite pleasant with me, until I started resenting her feeling comfortable commenting about my weight gain in recent years. ("Does she think she's doing me a service, pointing out something I might not have seen, or is she just trying to make me feel good? Screw her: she can shovel her own car out!") In fact, it is probably a mixture of all of those elements.

And now, like the good Catholic that I was very briefly during the confusion of my coming-out process, I have wiped the slate clean by confessing and can start all over again. (Yeah, I am more familiar with the theology than to believe that that's how the confession thing works.)

So Is This a Lion or a Lamb?

You know that whole thing about the month of March: in like a lion, out like a lamb, or vice versa.

Well, here is another lovely photo with my web cam out my front window:


Yes, another big snow storm just to make a liar out of everyone (that would be me) who like to say that once March gets here, it's pretty much over for the year.

In Montréal, there are little signs on every street that no one from anywhere else can figure out, but which relate to the two one-hour no parking times each week to allow the street sweeper truck to pass. These parking restrictions come into effect on March 1 each year and last until December 1.

Why do I think that the street sweeping truck might start a little later this year?

(And, just to underline the wisdom of anyone I might happen to know who is, say, in Mexico at this moment...our temperature is also supposed to dip below -20°C on one or two nights next week.)

Hope you haven't run out of sun screen ... you wouldn't want to prematurely age your skin!

Five Days After the Snow

Here is a little look at what happens after a large enough snowfall in Montréal. What you see streaking by outside my window above is the grader that goes by to make the snow into a ridge in the street away from the sidewalk. Next is the other kind of large plow that they use mostly for the street corners and to clear the snow away from bus stops and the like.

If you see one of these (below) coming your way, jump! They are the small plows that speed along the sidewalks, removing snow and depositing salt and (*argh!*) tiny rocks that I have heard are actually a by-product of aluminum smelting (these are for traction).

Once the snow has been prepared for removal, you will see lines of empty dump trucks like the one below.

And then along comes the snowblower, picking up all the snow and depositing it in the trucks to be hauled away. While it used to be dumped into the river, salt and all, they are now a little more environmentally conscious and work to try to recover some of the salt and process the rest before it gets to the river.

Here is a full truck speeding by my apartment to get rid of the snow:

This can be a very efficient exercise when all the drivers obey the 12-hour no parking periods to allow for snow removal (those who park get towed, but it slows the whole thing down). This time, my side of my street was cleared overnight between Friday and Saturday (2 days after the snow) and the other side was done the next night. They are so efficient at getting rid of it that when I came home from shopping on Saturday afternoon the sidewalk on my side of the street was actually bare and dry (a little help from the sun being out, too).

And all of this accounts for tens of millions of dollars in the city's budget each year, but, like I said in a previous post, it is the stick by which we measure the effectiveness of the municipal government. If the mayor can't get rid of the snow within 5 days, it's time to consider getting rid of the mayor.

Frosty Valentine's Day

Here is the view this evening outside my front window:

This is our big snowstorm for Valentine's Day, which is always amusing. What you see at the bottom of the picture is snow building up on the outside of my window. The thing you don't know is that I live on the second floor!

Yeah...not that much snow: my window does have a ledge on the outside that captures snow. I think, ironically, that it is our neighbours to the south in the U.S. who are getting bigger snowfall amounts. Here, if the mayor wants to be re-elected, our snow will be plowed and taken away from the streets within the space of a maximum of 5 days. Anything beyond that time frame starts people grumbling about the ineffectiveness of our municipal authorities.

Until then, we'll have some amusing times watching people dig their cars out (after road crews heap snow on them from the streets) and try to figure out where they can park in order to avoid the snow removal operations.

I'll see if I can't capture some of the common machinery as the clearing begins over the next couple of days (our city has invested many millions in this equipment and has a giant snow removal budget each year that hasn't been used much so far this season.)