which is most unusual in Vancouver in March - especially the end of March. Usually by this time I'm wearing my sandals 70% of the time but this year I'm still wearing my boots. And my wool scarves. And my gloves.
This is what it looked like today outside my office window -
and to make matters even weirder - if snow in Vancouver on March 28 isn't weird enough - I got caught in hailstorms the previous two days. We had ice on the sidewalks on Tuesday, thunder and lightning, and six inches of water racing its way down the roads. Last night, I left to go out and meet a friend for dinner and it started hailing hard enough that it was bouncing off the roads and sidewalks and my umbrella.
In one way, it's entertaining. I mean, we don't get much snow so it's always fun and we almost never have hail so that's fun. But in another way, it's frightening.
I think that my little snowstorm and hailstorms are small symptoms of global warming - extreme and unusual weather. It fits in with the tornadoes in London, the extreme fog in London, the huge number of hurricanes last season, a whole bunch of other things. The fact that in northern Canada the ice roads - which support many of our northern communities by allowing freight to be trucked in all winter - have been open only a small period of their usual winter-long openings.
Okay, okay, maybe I'm over-reacting. And maybe I'm not.
What unusual weather have you seen recently? And does it scare you?
Kate
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