Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Calgary Winters...and CARS

Hi all, how goes things? I'm updating my blog yet again. I've just come back from my ballet class where I sweat and used rusty aching muscles, trying to force them back into the suppleness they used to know. The said muscles are less than pleased about this. They scream and protest but I always prevail. The following will only really be interesting to those who have endured winters in the prairie provinces.

We've survived a good 2 weeks of absolute freezing cold. During this time it: went down to below 30, snowed a good deal, forced me to plug in the car (yes! you really CAN plug in a car!), and caused a few cases of frostbite (not me directly). For a few days we enjoyed clear streets with piles of snow on either side. Today the temperature went up to +5. Needless to say outside it is DISGUSTING. The streets are wet with melting snow and what snow there is is soft and nicely colored brown from traffic.

Inspired by the warm weather I decided today was a good day to wash my car. After I finished subbing I dutifully took it to the coin wash and spent a whole 2 dollars to soap and rinse the damn thing. I don't know why I thought today was a good day to do this considering I know the patterns (I live in Chinook country). I admired the clean and glistening car for about 5 minutes (while still in the car wash, I thought I'd better stop staring worshipfully at it or attendants might've escorted me out). I say 5 minutes because that's about the time it took for me to get the car out of the car wash and onto the road where it promptly was covered with dirty traffic, snow slush. Ugh, I think the car actually looks worse now than before I washed it.

My car had two adventures today, one I've already told and a rip roaring time in the dance school parking lot. When I came out of my ballet class I hobbled over to the car and sank into the seat. After starting the engine I strapped the seatbelt on, put the car into reverse and...heard the wheels spin. Okay, that's fine, I'll try going slower. *wheels continue to spin* Hmm, alright well, maybe I'll try rocking it and shift it into drive. *wheel spinning sound gets irritating* Okay, start panicking because I appear to be the only person in the parking lot. This went on a few more times with the occasional variation of me getting out and vainly trying to shovel snow from the tires with my snow brush (other variations included wanting to cry/scream as the spinning noise tormented me). Luckily for me this story had a happy ending or I'd still be in the parking lot instead of writing this. It took 4 people to push me out of the literal hole I'd dug for myself. Thank goodness for nice dance school staff and a lesson to me to not park in deep snow when it's over 0 degrees.

That concludes another update on my rather mundane life. See you soon.


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