This weekend was pure white crystal hell. 30 centimeters of snow fell on Saturday. The snowfall was pretty steady during the day so we were able to go out twice to shovel this pure white crap. There’s certainly no need to join a gym this winter if you’re in Ottawa, as you just need to break out the snow shovels. We were hit with some pretty high winds late in the evening, so at 11pm I had to go out and clear the snow that was burying my furnace’s intake and exhaust pipes. The last thing we need is to suffer from some carbon monoxide poisoning. So I bundled myself up and trek around my neighbour’s townhouse, as I couldn’t go out my patio door due to the sheer amount of snow on it. It took me 5 minutes to walk some 100 feet or so. At the best spots, I had snow up over my knees. At the worst spot I had snow practically up to my armpits! Luckily I was next to my patio at that point so I could use the wooden railing to help myself out of that spot. If it wasn’t for that, I would probably still be there!
Sunday morning we woke up to even more snow. In fact, another 52 centimeters had fallen! That’s roughly 1 3/4 feet. With snow drifts, the snow was as high as 3 feet in some areas. It took us almost 4 hours to shovel this stuff, 2.5 hours at 2 people, then I did another 1.5 hours solo. I’m so tempted to get a snowblower for next year! My only dilemna is that my garage is so small that I wouldn’t be able to park my Jeep in there with a snowblower present. So shovel by hand, or dust off/scrape/warm up the car each time we need to use it. It truly is a hard choice. You see, when there’s just 1-5 or so centimeters of snow on the ground, I actually enjoy shoveling. I find it quite relaxing. It’s when there’s more than 10 that it goes from being relaxing to being an annoyance. 15 or more and it becomes a curse…. Oh well.
Some interesting facts about this winter, courtesy of the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Sun:
- Number of events with 10 or more centimetres this winter: 10
- Average number of 10-plus-centimetre events: 4
- Average March snowfall: 39.8 centimetres
- Record snowfall for Ottawa: 444.6 cm in 1970-71
- Snowfall in 2007-2008 for Ottawa: 410.7
- 22% of a winter’s snowfall falls in March
- Record snowfall for March: 106.7
- Snowfall for March 1st to 10th 2008: 97.6
There are very good chances that we’ll break the record for total snowfall this year. Lets just hope this kind of weather doesn’t happen for another 40 years!
There was at least some good news on Saturday. The Ottawa Senators decisively won against the Phoenix Coyotes with a score of 4-2. With each passing game the Sens are starting to gain back the winning form they had last year and at the beginning of this season. All we can hope for now is that they’ll keep it up and keep on improving.
Today I had to take a full day First Aid course at work. I hadn’t taken such a course since high school. It was really interesting and I did learn a lot. I’m now a certified first aider for the next 3 years! It also opened my eyes a little bit more on some things… I really need to quit smoking soon.
On the TV front, I’m a little bummed that tonight’s episode of Stargate: Atlantis was the final show of the season. We were left with the usual cliffhanger, and I have to admit it did come as a little surprise. I knew that the whole Teyla rescue thing wouldn’t get resolved until next season, but I didn’t expect to see what happened up until the last minute or so of the episode. Overall, it was a pretty good and interesting episode where Sheppard gets flung 42,000 years into the future due to some freak stargate accident caused by a solar flare. I’m not going to mention more in case some of you haven’t seen the episode yet.
And finally on the game front, I picked up Frontlines: Fuel of War for the 360 this weekend. I played the demo quite a lot and wanted more. Unfortunately due to all the shoveling that needed to be done, I didn’t get to play much, though I did manage to get a few multiplayer games in, as well as get about 45 minutes of the single player game completed. This game does not disappoint. I’m usually not one for FPS games on the console (gimme a mouse and keyboard any day for FPS games), butFrontlines: FoW does play very well on the 360. Hopefully I’ll get to explore the game a bit more this week.
