Why should they? Politicians vote each other raises.
-8ºC? -12ºC? Dammit, my plants are growing! All I’m asking for is seasonal! Fortunately, we got about four inches of snow before the temperature plummeted, so my plants have a bit of an insulating blanket. :rolleyes:
I knew I shouldn’t have gloated. 
See, snow is a good thing, not a bad thing. 
We just received a few inches overnight, which bodes well for skiing this weekend.
14 degrees on Tuesday!!! 
I hate you all.
sigh Warmest day so far this year was 1.8 degrees, and the highest temperature in the 7-day is 3. We’re just a couple weeks from having 6 full months of snow on the ground and we’ve yet to have any real melting. Driving down my street there are many yards where the pile of snow beside the driveway is higher than the roof of the car in the driveway.
:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(
I have been talking to people back east about the “white stuff on the ground” in Vancouver: Cherry Blossoms! My father in Thunder Bay told me very politely, in no uncertain terms, to “fuddleduddle”. I think the Trudeau era is returning!
I read this and instantly thought back to an unfortunate story from my high school days. The Catholic School Board newsletter we all had to take home had a feature about students at a neighbouring high school who were South American refugees, experiencing their first snow fall.
The photo caption “Columbian kids can’t get enough of the white stuff!” Caused me to burst out laughing in Home Room, even at the impressionable age of 15. I pointed out the joke to my home
Row teacher, who tried to pretend it wasn’t hilarious.
So yeah: thanks for jogging my memory with that one.
You know you’re Canadian when you watch the women’s hockey gold medal championship on TV and really get into it!
ETA: Go Canada!
Cherry blossoms in BC are made with white chocolate ?
Oh oh…
Cherry Blossom petals. And shakes fist at detop I am currently reading Sugar, Salt, Fat by Micheal Moss, so I am simultaneously craving sugary treats and repulsed by them.
I don’t think I have had a Cherry Blossom since the late 1970s. Do they still make them?
Congratulations USA. Good game.
Yep. They’re available at my local corner store. And they’re still as good as ever.
Since I never really liked them, and always found them too sweet, I guess I can strike them off my crave list. It’s ok, my book is making me crave (and loathe) everything from Coca Cola to frosted flakes, so it is not like there is a shortage. Right now I am at home and not leaving in the rain to buy junk food. I am safe… for a while.
Different strokes, I guess, which is fair enough. My American ex-wife, who never had such things while she was growing up, couldn’t stand them either. But that just meant more for me. 
Maybe we should start discussing Canadian-only treats. Does anybody remember Pep peppermint patties? Sweet Marie bars? And the classic: Thrills gum, which tasted like soap?
Coffee Crisps were of eternal fascination to my American ex-girlfriend. Along with Zero Bars, and bags of milk!
Ganong’s Chicken Bones (1885) and Pal-o-Mine (1920).
I can’t stand Cherry Blossoms, although the last time I had one was in the '80s.
Another Canadian candy I don’t like is Eat-More candy bars. As far as Hallowe’en candy goes, the only worse things were Thrills gum (natch), Kerr’s Hallowe’en kisses and Nutty Club brand unsalted sunflower seeds.
If you read the label of an Eat-More candy bar, it says “may contain cherries”. Even the manufacturers can’t figure out what the hell is in one. Apparently it’s made out of floor sweepings from the Cherry Blossom factory.
Ah, Thrills gum. I recenty saw a pack, I had to buy it - I had no idea this stuff was still made.
Gum that tastes like soap. What could be finer? 
So in fact, I’m one the manufacturers. I worked in the Hershey chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, Ontario as a co-op student in mechanical engineering. Eat-More and Cherry Blossom were both exclusively produced in that plant, which also produced Peanut Butter Cups, Oh Henry!, and the regular Hershey bars, along with several other products.
Eat-More was, from a manufacturing engineering perspective, a really clever product. It didn’t contain any ‘floor sweepings’ (I’ve worked in other facilities since and Hershey was top-notch in terms of safety and food standards), but it was made in large part from rework material. This means Oh Henrys that didn’t get properly enrobed with milk chocolate and were rejected by the optical sensors, or that broke in the machine, etc. It also included Cherry Blossoms that didn’t get properly molded.
There were, IIRC, four different recipes for Eat-More, depending on which material was available. The all included some amount of new ingredients, and some combination of rework material from the other production lines. Only one of the combinations included Cherry Blossoms, because compared to Oh Henry!, those aren’t a high-volume product. The ingredients were all placed in a steam kettle, cooked, and shaped into bars. Pretty simple really.
So that’s how they made Eat-Mores! It was a clever way to make more efficient use of material, in a way that allowed them to adapt to the production schedule of the other lines. And it wasn’t garbage from the floor, just candy bars that weren’t pretty enough to sell. The variation among these, though, is the reason the were so many 'may contain’s on the label.
I worked there in the summer of 2003. The plant closed a couple of years later, and I think most production was moved to a new facility in Mexico (maybe some when to Hershey’s plants in Pennsylvania). How, where, and if they make Eat-Mores and Cherry Blossoms these days, I don’t know.