Hot Town, Summer in the City
Posted in Weather on August 18th 2008 by Randy ReichardtIt will not be this hot again in Edmonton until 2009 at the earliest.
It will not be this hot again in Edmonton until 2009 at the earliest.
.: Edmonton received a big dump of snow on Oct 29, and instead of melting a few days later, it has continued to snow. Yesterday another 10cm covered the region, and the temperature hit -10C today. In other words, it’s miserable weather, and based on recent winters, way too soon for my liking. The City of Edmonton hire private contractors to clear snow from the main routes, but in the booming Alberta economy, most do not respond quickly when called to clear Edmonton roads, because their graders and front-end loaders are usually working elsewhere. So predictably, most of main thoroughfares in Edmonton remain covered in snowy oatmeal. I took a few digital photos of the campus as I left work this evening.
.: The saying that you don’t know how much you miss something until it’s gone snuck up on me today. Imagine my surprise then, while shopping for produce at Sobey’s this evening, I saw a fresh bag of this on sale. I was thrilled! I was not aware that border restrictions on imports from the United States had been relaxed somewhat in late October. Now I can make my favorite kind of salad again.
.: On a work-related note, my secondment at NINT has been extended until January 2008. BTW, the new nano-word I learned this week is nanoscratching. Don’t ask. A friend recently asked me how the “nanobrarian” work was going. I checked Google, no results. Well, maybe now there will be! 🙂
.: The band has a gig on Sunday, 26 November 2006, at The Fox. If you’re in town, come on down and enjoy some tunes.
.: From Friday night to Saturday night, Edmonton received >18 cm (~7.1″) of snow, about 3 cm short of the record for March 18th. Edmonton had no permanent snow until Feb 21 or 22, so I can’t complain about this much snow so late in the winter. The only complaint is a typical one: the City of Edmonton never gets the roads cleared of snow with any speed whatsoever, and the side roads and residential streets are always ignored. Yesterday after shovelling my driveway, I got into my car and backed out onto the street, where the vehicle was stuck immediately, unable to move forward because of too much snow underneath the car. No one was around to help, and I spent 20 minutes digging myself out.
No worries: winter ends tomorrow morning!
.: 21 March 2006 update: apparently a record was set on Saturday, as just over 22 cm of snow fell that day.
.: Of course, within hours of my previous post, it snowed in Edmonton. It was a light dusting, not enough to cover lawns, but the white stuff nonetheless. I’ll have pictures soon.
.: Did you watch Lost tonight, Episode #34, The 23rd Psalm? The element of science fiction was introduced – the “monster”, never seen but in the background in a number of episodes, appears to Eko and the Hobbit Charlie in the jungle. While Charlie sits in a tree, swirling black smoke, seemingly sentient and emitting a deep curdling techno-noise, emerges from the distant trees following two explosions, moving very fast and strong enough to destroy a tree in front of it as it speeds to within inches of Eko, then stopping on a virtual, airborne dime, hovering in front of him. The camera glides through the smoke as split-second images from Eko’s past appear from within the black cloud – is the smart smoke reading Eko’s mind, and sending the images back to the mother ship? After a few more seconds, it retreats at high speed and disappears back into the forest.
So this is what snatched the pilot from the cockpit and killed him, rustled the trees in the first episode, and tried to grab Locke and drag him away in another episode? I waited six weeks to see the big scary monster revealed to be black smoke? Might we see the monolith from 2001 in an upcoming episode as well? The creators of the show have (apparently) stated that the story would not have an sf angle as it unfolds. Well, unless there is a brilliant scientist, inventor, or engineer hiding on the island in an undisclosed location, or the black smoke is related to the Dharma Initiative (I know, it probably is), start the Hugo nomination voting now.
Suspend thy disbelief, my friends, the show can only get weirder and less believable (even with the required suspension of disbelief in the first place.) At the opening of the preceding (recap) episode tonight, the tail of the plane was shown slamming, and I mean SLAMMING into the ocean water at a speed that would have killed most if not everyone on board (assuming anyone could have survived the plane splitting apart in the air in the first place, and the subsequent descent of its parts into the ocean.) Instead, we accept that most survived without a scratch. (Remember the hijacked 767 that was forced to land on the ocean surface near the Comoros Islands in 1996? Six of the twelve crew members and 119 of the 163 passengers died. The crash was caught on video – watch it, and it becomes very difficult to accept the premise of Lost.) What’s happened to Danielle, the nutbag French woman? How is Desmond doing since he split the underground bunker to go hiking? Did a polar bear eat him? How are the sharks with the Dharma logo doing these days, and what happened to the Deliverance extras who kidnapped Walt at the end of Season One?
Part of me wants to think this is brilliant writing and a great story, but another part of me wants to slap the writers silly for adding so much improbability to the many threads in the show, which is becoming one multi-year cocktease. And yes, dammit, I will keep watching Lost.
.: The view from the door to my parents’ place in Winnipeg, 15 November 2005:
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:: I’ve been in Calgary since Wed night, attending the CLA Conference. Today, the weather turned cool and rainy again, as it was about a week earlier, when I was in Toronto in the sweltering heat, humidity and smog. It was drizzling all day, eventually evolving into a two-hour torrential downpour, while I was attending a party this evening in a large tent at the Canada Olympic Park. A number of flood watches are in effect for southern Alberta and regions around Calgary.
The conference is I do not attend generally, but I enjoyed it a lot, including the panel on which I was a participant.