Snowstorm in January 2014

Snowstorm in January

January 5, 2014

A year ago today, our little corner of the world was covered with a deep blanket of snow.  This picture was taken as the snowstorm let up enough to be able to see the snow accumulating on our street.  By nightfall, the winds picked up causing the still falling snow to create large drifts.  It was still snowing the next day, huge drifts everywhere!

The Big Snow Storm

Neighbour Clearing Our Driveway

January 6, 2014

Like many in southern Ontario, we are still digging out from under a very deep blanket of snow.  The snow started in earnest Saturday evening, worsening Sunday.  The road conditions quickly deteriorated as the winds picked up whipping the blinding snow into a frenzy.  Then the freezing rain hit followed by more snow.  The plows off the road resuming operations this morning to start the clearing.  Residents have been asked to stay off the roads and there is a parking ban on all municipal streets to help with the clearing of the snow.   Still they were hindered by cars stuck on roadways.  There were reports of power outages and closures as the temperatures plummeted to record lows.  A lot of cars and generators won't start due to the cold.  Many are reporting frozen pips.  Warming stations are open. 

We are very, very blessed to have wonderful neighbours who cleared our driveway.  It quickly filled in so they cleared it again!  Our power has stayed on so our house is warm and cozy.  One of our friend's furnace blower quit so his house is in the 60's because he can only run the furnace for very short periods of time.  We lent him our electric space heaters.  He doesn't want to leave his house in case the pipes freeze!  The temperatures continue to fall. 

This storm has had a huge impact across North America due to the polar vortex.  I suspect it will be affecting many areas for several days yet...

Double Rainbow

Double Rainbow

 April 26, 2012

Southwestern Ontario has been experiencing some rather bizarre weather.  We had virtually no real winter and certainly not any kind of cold snap where the air is brittle and the snow crunches under foot.  We experienced a little over two weeks in March that was so warm folks were wearing shots and walking around barefoot.  Our furnace was off for the entire time!  Then April hit and frost came a lot later than the predicted ADLF date of April 15.  It is destined to be a bad year for fruit production given the fruit trees were blossoming only to be hit by late and heavy frosts.  Farmers are already complaining.  Then the storms hit.  These storms are rather strange as well with very high and damaging winds yet little precipitation.  Last week we had a horrid storm with very high winds and driving rain that seriously came down in sheets.  The sun came out, shining brightly amidst the driving rain giving a beautiful fully arched, double rainbow.  Had the rain let up, I could have got a few pictures of the full arch.  It was gorgeous!

Garden Gnome
©2006-2012

Wordless Wednesday - Threatening Weather

Threatening Weather

September 22, 2011

Garden Gnome
©2006-2011

Blog Your Blessing Sunday - We Survived the Stormageddon 2011

Early last week the weather predictions were for a huge snowstorm set to hit our area late Tuesday evening.  Tuesday morning cancellations had already started.  The snow began falling here in the early evening.  It was a fine snow but appeared to be accumulating.  My husband had decided to close the office on Wednesday so was a bit disappointed to see pavement on our driveway Wednesday morning.  Here our driveway had been plowed!  The road conditions were reported to be quite treacherous low visibility and large snow drifts due to the high winds.  We had received about 30 cm of fresh snow overnight so drifting was rather significant.  By lunchtime the wind had died down a bit so my husband decided to go into the office.  The roads were not as bad as expected although he experienced nastier roads on the way home.  The roads stayed nasty on Thursday and Friday with drifting snow.  Overall though we faired nicely during Stomageddon 2011.  Our utilities were fine, our driveway got plowed a couple of times and we enjoyed nice home cooked meals so all was well!

Garden Gnome
©2006-2011

Wordless Wednesday - Wedding Rainbow

Wedding Rainbow

August 14, 2010

Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

Blog Your Blessings Sunday - Acts of God

This past week we have had a bit of rather turbulent weather ranging from severe thunderstorms, tornado warnings, high winds and a tornado touching down causing heavy damage in Midland, Ontario.  On Wednesday at 1:41 PM Ontario and Quebec experienced a 5.0 magnitude earthquake with the most damage in the epicentre of Echo Lake, Quebec.  Tremors were felt throughout most of Ontario and into US states as far as Pennsylvania.  It was rather scary to feel the house shake and sway as it did.  I was on the lower level that is mainly below grade when the tremor hit and things did move!  Despite the damage caused by these Acts of God there were no deaths and only minor injuries.  What an amazing blessing! 


Garden Gnome
©2006-2010

Unsettled Weather

Evening Beauty
June 23, 2009

After such a cool, wet spring the weather as turned very hot and humid. We are very fortunate that due to our location we have not had to turn our our AC yet! Others have had theirs on for the last couple of weeks or more. The hot, humid weather always means the potential for severe thunderstorms. Yesterday we experienced several short power outages as the storms went through. There was amazing ground to cloud lighting. As I quickly type this another line of thunderstorms are almost ready to hit. It's already dark and very still with just a hint of thunder getting closer and closer. This series is quick moving as my husband called me less than 10 minutes ago with the warning. It was clear then! As the storms clear it makes for great photo opportunities. This was Tuesday night's sunset. Isn't it gorgeous?

Ok, time for me to power down.

Garden Gnome
©2006-2009

The Delay

Emergency Crews

We have a lot of travel experience yet it still amazes me some of the seriously bonehead ways of other drivers. We were traveling along Michigan's I-94 in some rather nasty road conditions. There was no doubt that visibility was greatly reduced and the road conditions were icy. For the most part drivers were slowed down leaving plenty of space between themselves and the next vehicle. Still there were those "I'm important" drivers that insisted on passing in a passing lane unfit to drive in and more often than not would hit the brakes to get back into the better driving lane. I shuddered each time I saw this. It would only take hitting the brakes a little harder than they thought or hitting an ice patch or dry pavement to send the car spinning out of control. What really bothered me is when it was clear there was a problem ahead so traffic was stop and go.

Honestly what is it with some drivers who feel they still have to put others at risk when it is obvious that there is a problem ahead. It doesn't matter how many unsafe lane changes, horn honks, near accidents or obscene gestures they make they are not going to get where they are going any faster until whatever is slowing the traffic clears. These folks need to seriously chill and be thankful that they are not the cause for the delay or the cause for complicating the delay.

We were in the stop and go traffic for a good 40 minutes when we finally arrived at the scene pictured above. It was a horrible accident with lanes blocked and obviously with serious injuries and one or more fatalities. So to the people in such a rush to get through the blockage that they put others on the road at risk, I hope you took a good look at what the delay was all about. Thank your lucky stars it wasn't you and realize your day was 100% better than the day the occupants of those vehicles involved in the accident were having!

Garden Gnome
©2006-2008

Possible Funnel Cloud

Possible Funnel Cloud
August 25, 2007 7:15 pm

Last evening the skies darkened so we went out to take pictures of the approaching storm. At 7:10 pm I took a photo of an artifact in the clouds that I thought looked interesting. By 7:11:32 pm the artifact looked like a possible small funnel cloud so I kept on snapping photos as the cloud developed. At 7:12 and 7:14 I took two video clips to capture the swirling and sounds of the storm. This photo was taken at 7:15 pm. By 7:16 the cloud appeared to almost touch the water. The winds picked up further along with the strange almost like a train noise. As the cloud approached us, we ran for cover barely making it indoors before the rain hit. We watched from indoors as a wall of rain quickly approached. The last video showed the wall of rain just before it hit our house with an annotation by me of "Oh my God!"

Storms

Stormy Skies
August 23, 2007

Yesterday the temperatures soared and the humidity became stifling so we took the boat out for short ride while dinner was cooking. My husband declared it too hot to grill! It was no surprise when an evening thunderstorm blew through. We sat in the sunporch listening to the roaring thunder while watching the lightening flash as Zeus and Thor fought out their battle once again. The whipping winds drove the rain with a furry while the waves crashed into the shore amplifying the sounds of the storm.

This morning the lawns were soggy but there was little damage from the high winds in our immediate area. There was a bit of wind damage and flooding away from our shielded area. Today the high is to be 31ºC but with the humidex it feels like 45ºC. Thunderstorms are predicted for this evening with showers overnight. We went from everything being so dry to so wet with no in between.

As I type this post the skies have been getting progressively cloudy with the humidity increasing. The air feels stagnate and the trees are eerily motionless. The conditions are perfect for severe thunderstorms. Normally this type of weather would send me scrambling to disconnect the modem. For the past four years we have had dial-up only because high speed simply is not available here. A couple of years ago one internet provider started offering wireless high speed but because of the abundance of trees we could never get a line of sight. Another company came out again Tuesday but couldn't get a line of sight either. So we called another company who offers a newer wireless satellite internet service. It was hooked up Wednesday! Ladies and gentlemen, I now have high speed internet so am now up to the speed of the rest of the world.

Stormy...

Storm Clouds
April 10, 2007

As many of you know I have been undergoing a lot of dental work lately, something not really appreciated given my dental phobia. You will also know we have our house on the market so there is more stress then. Well, yesterday I spent a lovely two and a half hours bonding with my dentist. He froze then added more then added more until he was up to a total of five additions just to get my mouth froze enough to work on it. I'm classified as hard to freeze and despite the extra, most of my left lower side was unfrozen by the time I left his office. So that was my fun afternoon. The position in the chair had really aggravated my cervical injury so all I wanted to do was get home and lay down. I was not impressed when he said I need a crown for the one tooth to the tune of $850 CDN and that's after paying $375 yesterday. The worst part is the freezing makes me physically sick to my stomach. When I got home I thought perhaps I should keep moving knowing that it would help so decided cooking would take my mind off of everything. I nicely hauled out all the packages of chicken breasts to remove the skin and bones when the real estate agent called wanting to show the house at 7 giving me time to do the spit and shine but no cooking and perhaps enough time for a half hour nap. I just finished the spit and shine when she called again and asked if they could go through earlier. I was in tears! The showing went well so after they left I crashed on the couch somehow despite the pain blissfully drifted off to sleep with the food channel playing in the background.

Today's tick off concerns genealogy even though I am still in pain. I thought between cooking and genealogy today would at least be productive. A few years ago I wrote a very detailed essay that I want to include in my book. I know the hard copy was sitting on the printer but I have somehow misplaced it. I thought I had a back-up copy in Word but since changing over to Mac have not found it in the documents. Not being able to find these kind of things really irritates me as I tend to be a very organized person. So I now have to spend my time searching through drawers and computer files.

On the bright side, I must be doing something right with my blogs. My cooking blog got it's very first spam comment! It was very long so I lost interest after the first sentence but I really do promise to go back and read it (not!). It was by someone named Anonymous which is a pretty neat name. Thanks to Anonymous I now know everything that is wrong with the world and why. I can see a whole generation of kids being called Anonymous just because so many of their parents have communicated with this really cool person.

The Beauty of Storms

Triple Lightening

Winter Storm

This video clip was taken this morning after the snow decided to stop. The wind was still fairly strong but if you listen carefully you can hear the ice moving. I'm still playing with the quality of the videos uploaded so this one is a little grainy. Sorry about that.

Reflections

Storm Clouds

Have you ever had one of those days when you spend more time tweaking the tools than getting the work done? So it was with me today. I was up bright and early ready to do a lot of data entry. I restarted the Mac in Windows mode and fired up Legacy. No problems except I had forgot to transfer the image files over to the XP drive. From Mac that is fairly easy as all I have to do is click and drag to the hard drive icon. Anyway, I had forgot so decided to carry on. Then I noticed that the tagging was off. Legacy has a tagging system that will set 9 tags. Somehow in the change over the tags were lost! It was only 10 am and I was already getting frustrated! So I tinkled with the tagging and then left it alone to move onto the lap top. Now the lap top and desktop work together especially if I'm online. But Legacy on the laptop running through Virtual PC decided it was going to be a pain. It took about 3 hours and several reboots to finally get the gedcom to work only to discover all the tagging was missing from the file. Now I seriously love Legacy and it would take a lot for me to switch. Legacy's programers will likely have a Mac compatible program shortly as they are very progressive. I did install both Heredis and Reunion on the lap top just to see how they behaved and the reality is that if I find a Mac program that does exactly what I want, chances are good I'll use it if only on the lap top. Both are Mac programs so I'll test drive both of them and email Legacy for support as well. I did manage to get a bit of data input onto the desktop. It is performing nicely with the duo core so with a little tweaking things should be fine. The lap top may be floating in the water shortly!

Well, enough of the complaining. I went full tilt, one step ahead and two steps back from early morning to about 2:30 PM when I decided I really needed a break. The weather was unseasonably warm so I went down to the veggie store where I got a few good deals. I only went for mushrooms to add to the pot roast vegetables but what the heck. It was good to get out into the sun and mild weather. When I got back I put the vegetables in with the roast for dinner, decided what I was going to put up for the night then sat by the water's edge to simply listen.

Sometimes life gets so hectic or we get so frustrated we forget to just simply be. We forget to listen and truly see. Quiet reflective time is so important because it helps to ground us so we can make connections. A peaceful calm passed over me and even though I could hear the calling of my ancestors there was peace as the water methodically swept the shore. It became clear the path I should follow yet I was at peace.

Storms

This is one of my favourite views and we are very blessed to be able to experience it often. Unfortunately the season is coming to an end. The boat will be lifted out of the water on the twenty-third and with the weather forecast there may not be a ride before.

Today has been very stormy with power outages. My husband decided to combine an appointment with a bit of shopping. This would have been bad enough except this was not small shopping it was looking for two major purchases, running in and out of stores in the pouring rain!

Our fridge decided to act up right about the same time as the car. When you walk by the fridge and get a blast of cold air even though the doors are shut, that is just not a good thing. I'm not impressed! The problem with replacing the fridge is finding one to fit into the space we have. That is not an easy task. We finally found a couple of Whirlpool side-by-side models with ice and water dispensers that would fit. Armed with those model numbers, we'll do our research before buying but unless we do a major kitchen overhaul one of those will likely be it.

Well, maybe shopping will brighten these grey, stormy days. They are predicting snow flurries already. I need to move somewhere where the sun shines almost daily! Storms are still threatening and the power is iffy at best. I'm going to light a couple of candles and sit in a nice hot bubble bath for awhile while the world just comes down to a slow spin.