I hate snow!!! | Talk it up | Forums

You poor thing! Lucky the damage is only to property though (as much of an inconvenience as that is). Sounds like it could have been pretty life-threatening had the limb  come down on the house.

Bad winters all round in the northern hemisphere this year. We've had our coldest winter in years (and that's saying something!) and 90 percent of the country I live in is snowed under. A state of emergency has been declared for a large swathe of the country and emergency aid from the international community is starting to flow in to get to those affected in isolated rural areas.

I have admit that my main problem is not snow, though, but ice. Deadly stuff. Once the snow is compacted down into ice by myriad tramping feet, I have extreme difficutly in staying upright. Have had some slips and slides this winter. However, last winter I did some real damage. Had a massive fall that resulted in extensive soft-tissue damage to my hip and thigh. Had pain for six months, and even now it still gets achey.

But such is life in the snowier parts of the world, hey. Anyway, good luck with getting the TV and internet back up and running! Hope to see you fully back online soon!

Gotta admit that snow – for all the problems it can cause (Karen's situation a case in point) – is a beautiful thing. I love nothing more than a blanket of fresh snow and the sound it makes crunching under my feet as I walk through it. Magical. Good thing, too, as it's frozen in this part of the world for a lot of the year. Last year we had snow into the beginning of June, a brief summer and then snow again from September. The summer clothes stay in the closet for the majority of each year! I guess that means they last a long time, though!

Refpeuk said:

I live in Vancouver, and we're dying for the snow you have. Cypress might be saying that they're confident they will have enough snow to function for the Olympics, but that is only because they are carting it in with trucks and helicopters.

So much for our "green" Olympics!

Oh yeah, I saw that on BBC world news. Love Vancouver though … actually got married there – on Burnaby Mt under the totem poles. It was magical. My number-one favourite city, actually!

Locutus said:

Which Vancouver?  I live right on the Oregon side of one of them (hint:  the one that has an Oregon side!)

First one to guess what city I live in gets a free cooookie.

Off the top of my head, I'd hazard a guess at Portland. Do I get a cookie? If so, chocolate chip please!

Wheezer said:

Here in eastern North Dakota we've had as much snow as we got last year. Which resulted in record breaking flooding last spring.

This years flood preperations have already begun and it's been the lead story on the 10 O-clock news for over a week. Fargo is even starting their sandbag filling operations so they can have at least a million sandbags ready to go at a moments notice.

And we're still at least two months away from when the floods normally begin.

The snow is nice to look at, but the wildlife is having a tough time. And I actually had to resort to renting a full size payloader to move huge snowbanks out of my yard (to make room for more snow from plowing the driveway) and to help a neighbor clear snow drifts out of his driveway that the snowplow on the pickup couldn't move.

Don't get me wrong tho, spending a day driving that big payloader was a lot of fun!

Yeah, you're right, it is tough on animals. Here in Mongolia, two million livestock have already died, and another two million are expected to die in the coming two months. These are big losses for a poor developing country in which 30 percent of the population are nomadic herders and agriculture is the central part of the economy. A very tough winter for everyone, hey.

@ Jabtano: Technically, We are actually still in an ice age.

@ Wheezer: Wow, 50 per day. That must be quite a sight. Speaks volumes about how hard a winter they're having. And that's saying something given the horrendous winters you endure in North Dakota.

In this part of the world, the gazelle have been fleeing en masse over the border into Russia in search of food, which the Russians are none too happy about as they pose a threat to the limited available fodder there. I've experienced a lot of severely cold weather here in the past six years, but the difference this year is how prolonged this period of extreme cold is. We expect the mercury to drop extremely low – that's a given – but to stay at these levels for such a length of time makes it, as the government has duly classifed it, an "extreme weather phenomenon". And every time I switch on the world news, I see reports of this all over the northen hemisphere. I'm just thankful that our little apartment is semi-warm (we still have to bundle ourselves in a few layers, but that's not a problem). Roll on spring, is all I can say.