By Lauren Kelly, Editor-in-Chief
I’m getting pretty tired of all this snow and cold stuff, to be honest. I’m sure that’s not a controversial opinion at this point. When I looked out my window today and saw snow lightly falling, I didn’t think “How pretty!” or “I can’t believe it’s snowing and it’s almost March!” or whatever. I just feel pretty done with it. Luckily for me, in my part of Coquitlam nothing really stuck, but I’m sure other parts of the Lower Mainland have had it worse.
I shouldn’t complain too much—we’re incredibly lucky to be out of the worst of it. December and early January were hellish, especially for people like me who get around mostly on foot and transit. Walking was at best frustrating and sock-soaking, and at worst dangerous. I remember skating along the sidewalks by Broadway-City Hall Station in early January and legitimately being scared. And I’m lucky in this regard—many people who aren’t as able-bodied as I am had a much worse go of it, including one of my closest friends, whose back problems would have been aggravated by even a small slip.
It hasn’t only been snow, either. I’m not sure I remember a time before this winter when I’ve had so many Accuweather weather alerts popping up on my phone, with storms and winds and freezing rain in addition to all the snow. Last week there was a day filled with sun, hail, rain, snow, and graupel. I’d never even heard of graupel, pronounced “grapple” by Global News Meteorologist Kristi Gordon but spelt very strangely. It’s apparently a type of soft hail. Things have been weird on the weather front.
It would seem a bit sweeter if we’d had a better summer last year, but it was the mildest, cloudiest, rainiest one in recent memory. It barely seemed like summer arrived and then it was gone, turning into months of rain and then snow, then rain, then snow, then rain, then snow. I’ve been looking towards the future to see if things take a turn for the not-shitty any time soon, but early to mid March looks like a whole bunch of 5 and 6 degree days. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!
Pretty much, I hope that we have another hot summer. I’ll take a too-hot summer, too. I want to forget all about our bizzarely un-BC but very Canadian winter and suffer through months of complaining about the heat, instead. At the least the heat isn’t slippery.
