This has been the longest, coldest, snowiest winter of my life. And I know I'm not alone in asking that it just please end, and sometime very soon.
Usually during a Saskatchewan winter, plans to go anywhere aren't final until right before you go to leave. Because you just never know what the weather is going to do. But this winter has been even more unpredictable than most. Highway conditions have, to put it bluntly, sucked on more than one occasion when I've been out on the road. Conditions have been so bad that I swear I spent an entire trip not breathing because I was so worried about my car just sliding right off the road.
There was rain this winter when it was -23C. How does that even happen? I'm no meteorologist, but that just doesn't add up.
We expect the weather to be a little crazier, a little more unpredictable, in winter's bookend months - November and March. But we've had to deal with this unpredictability since October. Things were dicey even around Christmas. And my plans were cancelled due to weather more than once in January and February.
I'm more than ready to call winter done at this point, so I can do what I want to do, when I want to do it - like I can in the summer.
But we still have spring to get through. A spring where the forecasters are saying we will see flooding. That's just what we need after this glorious (that's sarcasm) winter season. Now we need to shovel all the snow that's piled up around the yard over the past six months away from the house, to try and make sure the basement doesn't flood when it all starts to melt.
As much as I'd love a couple of 30C days to get rid of the snow in a hurry, I know that's not the way we need things to happen. We need the snow to go a little at a time, in order to keep things together.
I just wish, at this point, we would be seeing it go, bit by bit, instead of seeing new stuff fall - which is what I'm watching as I write this.
But what can we do, right? It's out of our control. I guess we just continue gritting our teeth while we wait for warmer weather to arrive. And remember that we're all in this together. We can complain as much as we'd like - there's no one in charge of this, no person sitting in an office somewhere we can lodge a complaint with.
The weather will do what it will do. All we can do is deal with it.
