Woo-hoo! First snow of the year!
“Christmas is a-coming and the goose is getting fat…”
…care to put a penny in an old man’s hat?"
Day’s are getting shorter, time to put up Christmas lights outside.Fruitcakes are all baked and nestled in alcohol-slumber, no snarkies please, I take the art of fruitcaking seriously. Halloween feh! Thanksgiving’s no big deal. Come on Santa!!! Wouldn’t mind a bit of crystalline precipitation about now.
You can’t put lights up until after Halloween, that’s the rule. I am all ready though, 5 boxes of icicle lights.
Quilt, do you have a good recipe for fruitcake? I loved my mom’s …
to j66: I use my Mom’s recipe, she never made any other kind. Unfortunately I don’t give it out, some things need to remain a mystery. Like fruitcakes aren’t?
We’ve already put up our lights in anticipation of the Grey Cup game to be held here in three weeks - green & white lights, natch.
Plus, we put up our lights early anyway - I don’t fancy being on top of a ladder, fidgeting with bare fingers on little clippy thingies and stiff wires, in sub-zero weather. Hallowe’en’s way too late.
Oh, man - where are you?
Please don’t say Montreal cuz I’m going there next weekend!
Really, snow already? We’re just grateful that a “cold” front is coming through here today that will make our high tomorrow only about 70F, unlike the mid-80s we’ve been having all week!!
You’re just getting snow? We had some the first week of October. It didn’t last very long, but it was definitely snow.
We had our first flurry on the ground (as opposed to in the mountains) on Saturday.
My 40-something year old husband, who doesn’t even have any tradition of Christmas, got all excited, not to mention the kids, who went wild. (Me, I just think, Oh, bloody hell, here comes the 5am snow shovelling joy…)
I wonder what it is about humans that makes most of us feel excited about snow?
I must say, that unenthusiastic as I am about the snow as work, I do LOVE being guaranteed a white Christmas (being a Brit, that’s a novelty!). We just bought our own house but won’t be living in it in time for this Christmas. Next year it will be DRIPPING in lights!! (White ones that can be left as long as the snow lasts as is the custom here…) In the meantime, the last season in our crappy apartment will be spent with the nicest decorations I can muster.
No! No snow! I can’t survive in cold weather! I instinctively curl into the fetal position when snow is mentioned.
There’s a slight chance of flurries tonight or tomorrow night. I’m dreading it. I need summer. I need to not live in Kansas - home of “85 degrees one day, 45 the next”.
I am not looking forward to scraping 2 inches of snow off my car every morning.
Roadkiller - “Iam not looking forward to scraping 2 inches of snow off my car every morning”
HA!
Come and live here… (northern Japan)
Last winter all the men in our apartment blocks were off on some training somewhere and there was a week long on again off again blizzard. On my stairwell of eight households, there was me, who had two kids of six and two, two pregnant women, two other able bodied women, one of whom NEVER digs snow on principal, and three single men, all off doing whatever it was they were doing.
It dumped about 80cm a day for six days. I was nearly going mad. The snow piles got so high and I was so tired that whatever I chucked back up fell right back down again. The kids were off school of course, and I and the other helpful woman were trying to get enough snow cleared so that
one other woman could get her car out to the main road to get her sick baby to see a doctor. I ordered my kids to stay upstairs(four floors up) and wait for me, and did 20 minute stints of shovelling, running up every now and again to check that they were OK.
The worst came when Older Brit Kid brought Baby Brit downstairs, howling and snotty with panic that his Mummy wasn’t there. Older Brit Kid had carefully dressed him in hat and boots and mittens. Just one minor thing - he had only pyjamas on! As soon as he was led outside the wind got him and bowled him over, it was dreadful.
The main part of the town does not suffer like this, but we are off the beaten track a bit, and all the area around our apartments and the road to it is private land, so there is no snow plough service.
There is also a rule that you must get your share of snow (your parking space and the bit of road that logically goes with it) cleared before it is squished down, as it packs to ice then. So if my husband is not home then I have to check at 5am to see if it has snowed. Mr Hokkaido is home about five days a month these days…
What is sickening is that he is immensely strong and when he IS home, he can clear in twenty minutes what takes me several hours.
I am SO looking forward to moving, living in my OWN house with my OWN rules about shovelling, and a father in law on tap if things get desperate…
[howl] We didn’t get any last year![/howl]!
Really. Well, a skiff on Christmas Eve and one in January, but they didn’t stick and were gone pretty well as soon as the snow stopped. No sledding, no snowballs, nothing!!
Call this CANADA?! Humph!
Mind you, last year it snowed six inches in May. Unbelievable! We usually have a heatwave in late May, 90f or so.
I’ll take palm trees with lights, they look pretty cool too. 
Whoohooo! We have SNOW this morning! Not the first of the year, but the first that’s piled up and stuck!
I went for my morning run and it was gorgeous… falling very softly and making the whole world look like it’s been frosted. Yaaayayayayay!