Carrick to Calgary

Hey, there. It's Friday here, at the start of a long, cold weekend. After a relatively mild end of 2004 (snow in mid-October and then a sort of Indian summer in November and then into the minuses in December with snow on Christmas night), the winter has gotten serious in the last few days. It's been consistently under -20, with windchills down into the minus 30s on occasion. We had an unusually warm Wednesday, only minus 5: I never thought I'd find -5 warm but it seemed positively tropical compared to normal. We've also had snow most days this week, 3cm yesterday (it snowed all day) and more to come. We spent 10 minutes clearing the drive this morning, and we're plugging the Jeep in every morning now when it's -20 and below.

It's the little things which get to you when it's as cold as this. Like when you breathe in and feel ice forming up inside your nose. Or if you spend too long breathing outside you start coughing up blood because the cold can injure your windpipe (your nose bleeds all the time too). Or when you start to lose the feeling in your fingertips and your hands stop working if you spend more than 5 minutes outside without gloves on. Or when you realise that the end of your nose is getting sore because it's your body's way of telling you if you stay out any longer you'll get frostbite... Or finding ice on your eyebrows when you come indoors. You have to wear a toque when you're outside for any length of time at all, just to stop from losing the tops of your ears. After a while, your default item of footwear becomes your snowboots, because you can just pull them on and go without worrying about freezing your feet / slipping in the snow. Everyone develops 'toque hair' after a while, and no-one cares as it's more important to keep warm than look good. The long-john issue is also interesting - do you put them on for the walk from car to work, and risk getting too warm later on indoors (the P 'at least I'll be warm'approach), or do you leave them at home and feel your legs turn to blocks of ice before you reach the front door (the J 'run and shiver technique') ?

At the end of the day, the rule-of-thumb is that if it's -20 or below you should probably stay at home, as you have to wrap up so much that it's not worth the effort going out. You have to cover up any exposed skin when it's below -18, as this is the temperature at which skin starts to freeze if left in the open. This means you have to pull your toque down and cover your face with a big scarf, leaving only a slit to look out of. So it's a time to stay home.

The plug-in season has also started at work. Your car engine may not start when it's -20 and below, so most Canadian cars come with 'engine block heaters' which get the engine warmed up so it can start. So you plug the car in when you get up so it's ready to go when you leave for work, and then when you get the car to work, you plug it in again (each space has its own socket) so it doesn't freeze while you're at work. The block heaters make a slight humming noise, so the car park is filled with the quiet hum of a hundred block heaters keeping their owner's engines warm for later. Weird.

We're also getting blowing snow this week. As you know, the snow here is very different from NI snow, in that it's an almost completely dry powder (imagine washing powder without the blue bits) which is crap for making snowballs (they just fall apart) but is really easy to shovel (imagine if someone covered your driveway with about a hundredweight of icing sugar and you had a shovel 6 feet long and three feet wide). The thing is that when the wind gets up, it lifts this dry powdery snow up and whips it around on the road surface like a little dust bunny (sort of a snow bunny), making little mini snow whirlwinds. This is OK on a small scale, but when the road is already covered in snow, the snow bunnies make it impossible to see the surface any more, as there's just a shifting whirling sea of snow in front of you, no horizon, no sides of the road to be seen. They had to close Highway 2 yesterday for this very reason.

They also had snow in Vancouver yesterday for the first time this year, and the Vancouverites weren't ready for it. No winter tyres, no 4x4, so there were a lot of accidents and TV footage of people desperately trying to drive uphill while their car slides backwards into the cars behind them. There was also a big accident at Didsbury (near here) yesterday with 4 trailers and 20 separate cars. Ouch!

The danger points here are at the intersections, where the ice formed from the dripping exhausts of the waiting cars is polished when the cars accelerate away from the stop, creating a slippy-slidy zone which can be a problem if you're not expecting it. Our big heavy 4x4 Jeep definitely handles the roads better than the Honda at the moment, as it has more weight on the road and more traction with all 4 wheels going. But even so, you really have to watch yourself. There are clouds of freezing fog and exhaust smoke hanging over the roads too, so you can't see too far ahead when it's this cold.

All of the cars in Calgary are pigging at the moment, as going to the carwash is not an option when it's -20. This is because in the time you take to drive home from the carwash, your doors and windows will freeze shut, trapping you in the car until you can get it warmed up a bit! We're not kidding - this happened to a friend of Ps!

I started in my new job this week, colorectal, and am having a great time - lots of operating and 'scoping, much more involvement on the wards, good training, altogether a great rotation. The days are a bit longer too, more like the RVH, but better for the change.

The cold snap is predicted to keep on going, with more snow and -25 over the whole weekend, maybe going up to -15 at the start of next week before plunging down to -30 (without the windchill - yikes!) on Wednesday. It's enough to freeze the whatsits off a brass thingy! Brrr!

Yours freezingly

J