Snow

Still digging ourselves out of the snow. Apparently, they do snow removal here. Which I'm sure I've heard of before, but never experienced. It involved snow plows of every size and shape, massive dump trucks, and a huge snow blower. Crazy cool. But, the down side to this is that they put up these signs on our streets and that night or the next morning, your car has to be somewhere else or they tow it. I guess cars would get in the way a wee bit. Apparently they tow around 25,000 cars every winter for this reason. Oh, and they have these cute little snow plows that clear off the sidewalks! And everyone has these tarp canopy things in their little driveways (at least the people who have driveways, which is surprisingly few) to keep the snow off their cars. This whole snow thing makes me feel like a 5 year old who is just learning how to add and wants to go around telling everyone how cool it is, but everyone is older and already knows how to add and is, well, much less of a nerd. And man, does it get cold here! Touching anything outside is painful, my lungs constantly ache, and my ears are cold no matter what I do. On the plus side, I'm really quite fond of math.

Anyway, last night Dylan notices this sign telling us we had to move the car. Except we don't actually own a snow shovel and the snow plows tend to completely bury the cars along the side of the road. Luckily, our neighbour was kind enough to lend us hers...by leaving it out on the back porch we share. Dylan goes and digs out the car, and finds a street that isn't doing snow removal yet that isn't full of cars from the streets that are doing it about 4 blocks away and it's all good. Then today I got worried that they would be doing snow removal on that street either tonight or tomorrow morning (I was right) and all of this led to me driving on the snow for the first time! All by myself too. I'm a big girl now. It was terrifying and slippery and the back windshield was covered in ice and condensation so I couldn't see out of it. And everyone rushed to put their cars back on the street as soon as the sign came down so now our car is 3/4 of the way down the block from us. Did I mention that it was cold?

In other news, Dylan and I are looking into a free french course that runs in Jan through a local church and today we talked to the adorable little old lady secretary who, not helpfully, didn't actually speak English. If it works out, it could be pretty cool and end up being helpful for us.