Tuesday, January 27, 2004
I guess we just had the "great storm" of '04. Judging from my ride back home yesterday and the weather forecast for today, I pretty much knew that today would be a work-at-home day.
Rather incredibly there were no cancellation notices for any of the Toronto school, though pretty much all of the private schools were shut, including the Healthy Earth Bilingual Nursery School that Annie has only just started going to. Much grumbling from Erika on this point, who wondered why it was always the private schools that were closed "when you'd think it would be the reverse".
A good deal of that work included shoveling snow, several times throughout the day, from the sidewalk and back patio. Vanessa was outside during one of my forays outside, and she was digging a hole into a mound of snow a bit smaller than she was. So instead of just shoveling the snow out of the way to clear a path, I decided to pile it all on top of that mound instead. Vanessa helped, as did Annie, who got all bundled up and excited came outside when she saw what was going on. By day's end we had a good 51/2 ft. high mound of snow, and Vanessa made a good job of hollowing out a tunnel that went deep inside of it. I packed things down as much as possible to make sure that some of it would freeze into ice thereby making it more stable. We placed at inverted icicle at the summit of the peak, and Vanessa dubbed it "Snowy Vanessa Mountain". Both girls had lots of fun crawling around inside it. Thanks in part to the shoveling efforts of my neighbour, I got a good start on a similar "Mount Annie" just behind our shed.
Glad I didn't head in. Despite hearing some idiot on 680 AM this morning saying that "it wasn't so bad -- don't think of this as an excuse to stay home from work" (or something similar) I knew what was coming, and the ride to be wary of was not the ride into work but the ride back. I just hope that guy ended up taking an extra long time to get back to his home, for the misery he undoubtedly caused other commuters who heard him. I heard a number of horror stories over the radio and from neighbours who had braved the weather. The story of the Woodbine bus fishtailing out of control down the steep hill to Gerrard in particular gave me the willies, since I take that bus everyday to work (no accident, no injuries – just a few seconds of "oh sh*t" from everybody on the bus waiting for an accident to happen).
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