It's a bit brisk out.

So, on the last post I mentioned that it was the night before a major storm was supposed to arrive. Well yes it did. And then another. And then a cold spell. And then another. All in all over the last three weeks we've had about two foot of snow and some really cold temperatures. Last Monday was a mild -18 degrees with a wind chill of -32. There were snow drifts in places of around four to six feet. Roads turn to ice rinks, cars turn to mobile snow transportation devices as people happily drive around with a foot and a half of ice encrusted compacted snow on their roofs.

The city council gets criticised for now ploughing enough, for ploughing too much, for creating barriers around the sidewalks with ploughed snow, for poorly ploughing the sidewalks, for bothering to plough the sidewalks, for burying people's cars in ploughed snow on smaller streets, for not ploughing side streets due to cars being parked there. The list goes on and the city cannot win.

Since the snow has, by and large, stayed around the city has launched an operation to remove the snow instead of letting it thaw off. This mainly consists of getting diggers out to lift the accumulated banks of snow into trucks so they can dispose of it somewhere else. When they clear the mounds of snow they find all sorts of things. People's cars that they haven't seen in weeks, bicycles, benches. In one case up in North York they found a body. A woman had been missing for a week and was found inside a snow bank at the end of a parking lot. No one is sure what happened as yet.

Even the lake has been freezing over. For several days it was more or less solid ice the entire way across the harbour to the islands. Walking down for a look some of it was strong enough to walk on, but some definitely not. That has mostly cleared now after the rain and milder weather at the weekend but it's still only -11 this morning. Mind you yesterday the cold weather made for interesting times for an incident in the city, but I'll talk about that in a separate post.