I tried to make some kind of olympic-themed cartoon stunt with Pilcher, some kind of bet, but turns out that the UK is not powerful at winter olympics as I thought...it confirms my theory: even though the Stanley cup is named after a british lord, you have to look elsewhere in our cultural family tree to find our northern edge and before Bombardier invented the snowmobile, the first canadians had sled dogs!
Little did I know, the UK, through Scotland, is a power at curling.
Nature gets back at monctonians for building their downtown and suburb on marshland. Whenever it gets milder (like 10 degrees above freezing point, sometimes) or worse, when there is rain and the snow melts, some of our biggest streets get flooded! That's not bad if you have an SUV (I still hate the things, though!) but if you're a pedestrian, your feet are wet all the time.
Little did I know, the UK, through Scotland, is a power at curling.
Nature gets back at monctonians for building their downtown and suburb on marshland. Whenever it gets milder (like 10 degrees above freezing point, sometimes) or worse, when there is rain and the snow melts, some of our biggest streets get flooded! That's not bad if you have an SUV (I still hate the things, though!) but if you're a pedestrian, your feet are wet all the time.
And if the weather suddenly decides to get subarctic again, watch the icy sidewalks if you don't want to become a human curling stone.
A Quebec poet said "My country is not a country, it's winter." I think the Russians can say that, not sure about us. Winter saved their butts from Napoleon and Hitler! Ours gave us a pretty unusual disaster in 1998 when half the country's electric grid failed under inches and inches of ice. Between James Bay (or Manicouagan, or Churchill Falls) hydro dams where the electricity is produced and Montreal where it is consumed, you could fit a few european countries or US states. All of that is just wires waiting for some snow.
I hate shovels, I hate winter coats and Sooky's paws hate driveway salt yet you don't know what you got until it's global-warmed into oblivion. If the other Arctic giant had comrade winter, here there is both a discovery that this despised season is at the core of who we are as a nation and we know it gets moodier than usual because of how the white man is behaving at the moment. There is a sense that we are wasting a treasure here and since the Vancouver games, we've rediscovered interest in winter along with aboriginal culture. I just hope it lasts.
After all, canadian winter, it's folk music, camps, maple syrup, saturday night hockey, lumberjacks, fireplaces and old stories, red and black plaid coats, fur traders, the boreal forest, Tim Hortons...
