Tagged with winter

better carve it on your forehead or tattoo it on your ass

This kind of weather with the ground all melted and refrozen doesn’t feel like March to me. I step outside on my way home from work and it’s November. I’m sliding my way down the sidewalk scanning for the bare patches of ground that allow me to step mit feelink and I know it’s just going to get colder and colder until I die.

Of course it isn’t actually November and the winter didn’t kill me. In fact, i never has killed me. And this walk home is different because my muscles are ready for this kind of treacherous traversal of ground. All the tensions they need to anticipate wrong movements are primed and ready from the last five fucking months. There’s no ache when I arrive home. And it ruins the lies I’m trying to believe so I’ll be surprised some day when it gets warm and stays there. For a while.

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windchill warnings in effect

Kate called from Los Angeles this morning. She was wearing sandals. I think I managed to stifle my squicky groan as I used that bit of knowledge how the “winter” outside Winnipeg can be to stab myself in the brain. The eye is part of the brain, right?

I hate the cold so very much. At work today Ivy said it sounded like the walking to work in the cold was making me bitter, but she missed the main point which is that winter itself, not whether I am walking to work or not, is what makes me hate. I really wonder what it would be like if I had grown up in a place where half the year wasn’t a constant war with the goddamned motherfucking elements. Where I wasn’t aware of the need to double up the fabric between mitts and sleeves so your wrists don’t die. What would my personality be like without this infusion of pain and misery every year?

I went to Quinzmas tonight only to be told that it was sold out. It was a 45 minute trip across the city (not the whole city) in the -39 degrees, directly after a 45 minute trip home from work in the -39 (but the wind then was at my back so I didn’t die as much as I will tomorrow on the way to work when it’s scheduled to be -47), only to have to walk out the fucking door and run to catch a bus that passed me. I did and so didn’t have to stand around waiting for a bus home until trying to get a connection. Still took another 45 fucking minutes though.

Needless to say these trips are glasses-less so my scarf can mummy me up and I expose as little skin as possible (and don’t have metal next to my flesh; just handling my keys to open my apartment direct from outside hurts), but that means I can’t see shit for finding buses. And Winnipeg’s cornucopia of different bus models doesn’t make it easy to memorize the smeary light patterns they make on my retinas.

I hate so fucking much.

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i’ll need a bacta tank before i do this in real winter

If you pay attention to my Twitter feed, you’ll see I biked to work today. Last week Holly wrote a bit about biking on her blog. I commented and she commented back about me being nice about not rubbing Winnipeg-cold in her face. Allow me a moment of doing that now please. A winter storm warning continues for Winnipeg and the surrounding area today and I was all, “I said I’m biking this winter so I’m fucking well biking today.”

They do not call them good choices, these things I have made.

It’s only hovering around freezing, so the cold is not the problem. Getting to work, getting home, my waist up was toasty. Sweating from the effort a bit even. My legs were soaked through. It was worse coming home because there was more snow on the ground. I’d thought there wouldn’t be much accumulation when I left. Going to work at 4, the problem wasn’t the snow but the 50 gusting 70kmh headwind. When my weight was on my back tire because I’m fighting for every little bit of forward momentum the wind, which was just off from directly ahead, was blowing my front tire to the side, like I was sailing or something. It was hellish. I got to work and said “That is why I want a job I can walk to.”

Coming home, I had that wind at my back, which I needed because now there was maybe half an inch of snow on the sidewalk. I promised my coworkers and my mother I’d ride on the sidewalk, just in case I wiped out. The problem of course is that when you’re trailblazing through fresh snow, that’s when you wipe out. The whole way down Keewatin I was looking at the slightly snowy but mostly wet street from my wobbly slidey sidewalk. If I had been fighting the wind too I would have stopped and just cried. When i got the chance I took Logan and rode on the street where the cars had warmed things up so there was bare pavement, under all the puddles. But I had traction so hooray. And I was soaked within seconds. But it’s not that cold yet and the ride doesn’t take that long (only double m usual time today) so I wasn’t too worried about actual hypothermia. As I said, my torso was feeling fine. My gears were getting all gummed up with ice and I took it real easy the whole way. Which I wouldn’t have been able to do had I been facing that wind.

Anyway, it was a stupid thing to do. Tomorrow I’ll take the bus. Maybe for the rest of the winter. It felt good to do it once though. To have done it I guess. It was only about an hour of my day of horrible painful awfulness. It’s good to feel that once in a while. Under controlled circumstances like your own stupidity. I’m home and warm now.

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post-march employed? beats me

I’m cold, though I shouldn’t be. It’s warming up around here. Up to -17 tomorrow I think. The mailman dropped off a package this morning and his face was so red I felt I could take a tiny hammer and with one little strike the entire frozen thing would fall into my hand. Obviously I didn’t approach him with a hammer, though when he left I told him to stay warm. He said he’d try.

On my walk through the sky to work the magician was suspended over Donald St. As I passed him he was talking to a homeless guy. It seemed he’d just shown him a trick for free and the guy was happy to see how it was done. I walked by vigorous handshaking and heard behind me the magician telling his patron(? audience? admirer) to stay warm. I didn’t hear how he’d try.

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dessert related injury

Of all the ways my ice cream craving could hurt me, I hadn’t expected my elbow being the part to suffer. I eat a lot of ice cream. And yes, that’s really contradictory in this weather, especially when I complain so much about being cold. Also, the conglomeration of sugar and fat is everything that’s wrong with the North American diet. Plus it’s probably very insensitive to eat half a litre a day while keeping my girlish figure through no fault of my own while others are off being active and such. Fuck it. I like ice cream.

Today at Safeway the Lucerne 2L boxes of good flavours (like Chocolate Chip Cookie and Heavenly Hash and such) were two for four dollars. Now, I only buy those types when they’re two for six dollars instead of $4.39 each. So two for $4 made me wet myself in joy.

But the issue was that they’re only on sale till tomorrow maybe (I’m not sure on the timeline) and to make the most of it without having to go walking down to Safeway again in the cold that displeases me so I needed to get a whole shwack of ice cream today. Luckily, today was payday.

But I also had a lot of other groceries to get, so for the first time I can remember (when I wasn’t shopping or being shopped for with someone) I needed two baskets: one for the rest of the groceries, one for ice cream. I suppose I could have used a cart but whatever I’d already filled up my basket by the time the ice cream sale made its existence known to me. No problem in Safeway or paying for it or anything like that, but as I started walking home I realized why I never buy more than one basket of groceries at a time. More than that is fucking heavy. Especially when there are 8L of ice cream involved.

I distributed the load evenly and made the trek home, but by the time I’d gone a block I could feel my left elbow, feel like it was being dragged from its socket. Each step the ice cream sagged just a little more stretching the joint a little further each time.

Soon I got worried about the strength of the plastic holding my ice cream. The checkout guy was new and I hadn’t realized he didn’t double bag it while I was in the store. Walking down Ellice I was sure the corners of the boxes were going to tear through, creating huge gashes spilling everything all over the sidewalk. Of course that would unbalance me so I’d fall, spilling the rest of my stuff. Broken glass and salsa everywhere. I’d have to call Alison to see if she could come pick me up with all my food because all the bags were ruined and I wouldn’t be able to kick everything home by myself.

By that time I was walking up my back lane and feeling the cold through my mitts and the pain in my elbow and I just wanted to get home. I fought with the back gate and eventually made it into the house successfully.

My elbow is still in pain. If that keeps up long-term, I may deem it a mistake to buy so much ice cream at once.

Though I’ll always have an excuse not to play tennis left-handed.

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… and thorough

Today wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It turns out Canadian homes are pretty well insulated. The electricians came this morning and the heat was out for most of the day while they installed … a new electrical box? Is that all they were doing? I guess there are some more outlets around the house too. Some of them may even be grounded.

Without the heat going all day in the -20ish weather (maybe -17C) I was sure I’d be chattering my teeth down to whatever you call the stuff under your enamel. It’s an old house, and drafty. So when the heat first went out I left to buy groceries, a somewhat foolish decision as I bought things that needed to be frozen and thence opened up the powerless freezer to dump the things in, allowing all the cold out. When I could have left the ice cream out on the porch instead. Smart boy this one.

At that point some of the house’s lights worked but the internet didn’t so I got some reading in. I wore an extra sweater but it was okay. Then all the power went out and I left to go buy socks. A cold day really drives home the fact that you own only three pairs that enclose your entire foot.

On my way back I had to stop for some filming for a sitcom that was happening on Ellice. The show’s going to be called “Make It Happen” and it’s about a family of driving instructors. The guy who stopped me from getting in the shot was telling me about it. Of course he compared it to Corner Gas.

And then I got home and the heat had been turned on and I parked in front of a vent and absorbed its emissions for an hour. Almost finished Shikasta, the Doris Lessing book I started reading after she won the Nobel Prize.

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to be fair, i’m chilly at anything below 37C

Because I am a good roommate I sat on the porch this evening to hear about Alison’s second horrible day at work in a row. Not that I wasn’t listening to her woes about the mother of the kid who won’t stop shitting himself, but I really enjoyed the sound of the snow/ice pellets hitting the branches surrounding the house. Sort of sounded like being under a My Little Pony rockslide. Of course, it’s hard to appreciate with the speed at which my extremities have blood shunted away from them due to the temperature. It’ll only get what, forty degrees colder this year?

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i guess it happens once a year

This afternoon I was up in my room when the freaky little ice pellets started barraging the area. They were bouncing off the bathroom window making a racket that got me off my couch to investigate. And I looked out the window and felt like crying. Or maybe just puking. I really really really hate winter.

Before I left for work I hunted out my mittens in the basement. They were stuck in the pocket of my brown coat, which is my next step in the winter coat progression. Today the yellow leather jacket got removed from the rotation in favour of my Nepali coat. I felt bad about it. Poor little guy. I just got that jacket and now it won’t be worn for months.

One of the things that bothers me most about the weather is how much tension I carry in my upper back from walking outside. I have to huddle in on myself to keep any semblance of warmth going and that tenses me up into a clenched little claw of a person. There’s no holding my head up high, only stoopedness to give the outside world as little surface area as possible to steal heat from.

I really shouldn’t live in the city I do.

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