Baby, It's Cold Out There!

It has been one nasty week here on the prairies - a time to tuck into a nice, warm house, and just stay there.

We arrived home from sunny Mexico late Saturday afternoon with our daughters picking us up at the airport. We spent the evening with them and my sister and her family (our fellow travellers), eating pizza and sharing our holiday stories. After a while Jesse wanted to know why we hadn't taken our kids with us, and to tell the truth, I had started to wonder the same thing halfway through the week. I guess I had always felt that this was a "grown up" holiday so you left your kids at home. I regret that decision now; it's a great way to introduce kids to travel, different cultures, and how to behave as an ambassador of their own country while they are there.

After temperatures in the mid twenties for a whole week I was surprised that the cold at the Winnipeg airport wasn't more of a shock to the system. I guess we can thank our lucky stars that we didn't land on Thursday of this week - with windchills of more that minus 40 degrees, we might have frozen solid in one breath.

In our corner of the province, we escaped the blizzard that totally shut down the city of Saskatoon mid-week; we only received a few centimetres of snow and the really cold winds, but the news casts from places north and west of here certainly kept us in tune with what was going on. I can remember some pretty significant winter storms in my life - a blizzard in January of 1978 that lasted the better part of a week and left snow drifts so high that we couldn't let the kids play outside afterwards because they would have been able to walk right up to overhead power lines and touch them - but the weather office insists that this storm doesn't have a rival in history until you go all the way back to 1955. It must have been something else, alright, to have zero visibility inside a city is pretty bad.

As a child of the fifities and sixties I grew up hearing stories about how the pioneers coped with blizzards by tying a rope between the house and the barn so that they could find their way home after tending to their animals - and woe to anyone who left that saftey line because it was so easy to get disoriented in the cold and swirling snow. People died then, and Mother Nature is no kinder today - three people died this week in Saskatchewan. It is a very sobering lesson to have to re-learn.

We're left wondering what the rest of the winter holds in store for us. It is still very cold, but they are promising better temperatures by next week. Mid and northern Saskatchewan have had lots of snow, and we've had more that we ever got last winter, but we'll happily take at least double what there is out there at the moment. Farmers are looking forward to the coming crop year - the "what to plant to make big bucks this year" and "the newest equipment that you can't possibly farm without" advertising campaigns have begun. Spring can't be far off now.