Things To Do in a Blizzard when the Windchill is –25°C

Hrm.  So you live in a climate where you get one snowstorm or it hits  –40°C once a year and people say this.

Those people suck.  They are also the same people who choose to live in places like Edmonton where it is, in fact, guaranteed to hit –40°C on at least one day a year and likely to have at least one snowstorm a year where it snows more in one day than it did in the rest of the winter up to that date.  I tell those people I like the climate in an intentionally sickeningly superior tone.

Well, this year, at least, I thought the weather had taught the climate change deniers a good, solid lesson, what with it being above zero for a good part of the winter.  It was like living in an temperate zone like, I dunno, Calgary.

Then the snowstorm hit and all bets were off.

Worse, the snowstorm hit on the weekend.  What good is that?  What good is a snowstorm if you can't waste an hour of work by being late, then another hour by talking about how you were late because the city hadn't ploughed and because of how bad all the other drivers are?  [Deadpan face, sound of crickets]

What to do?  What can young adults do on a day the weather's so bad they can't even keep the ambulance routes snowplowed?  On a day when the city is basically shut down.  On a day when cabin fever could surely set in!

Why!  GO FOR A WALK DUMMY!

Here are some of the amazing things to do in a snowstorm.

You can look at the Legislature when it's all blurry and magical.

You can discuss who would be loony enough to operate a crane in a blizzard (remember:  –25°C on the ground.  Who knows what it was 100 m above us!)

Then you can decide that it would be unbelievably out-of-this-world-swear-word-cool to go take pictures by the river in a snowstorm.  You are, after all, both wearing your parkas.  Red Panda's was hand-made by her Nana.  But, Hawk was getting cold, and truthfully, Red Panda probably would have been more comfortable in snow pants, and you were back on 104th anyway, so ...


Here's another thing to do when it's blizzarding and the idea of being stuck inside is just too much, but you don't fancy driving your car into a ditch or getting stuck or doing a 360° on a bus route (that is its own story, friends, sorry).


Go sit in a coffee shop and read!  Here's a picture of me before my glasses had fully unfogged.  Oh, it was good to be back in the warm, at Transcend, South American food and perfectly roasted coffee just moments away ...

I want to put a picture of my cappuccino with its heart-shaped foam here, but it keeps coming in sideways.  C'est la vie, non?

This, my friends, is the ultimate way to kill an afternoon during a blizzard.  If you happen to have a coffee shop exactly one block away from your house, that is.