On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:57:01 -0400, Dave Smith
wrote:

Hatunen wrote:

Early Monday morning I told my wife I'd check weather conditions
outside, so I went down to the front door of our apartment
building to check the street. Damn! The street was completely
plowed; they ahd been plowing through the night.

My wife drove me down to Town of Mount Royal to catch a train
into downtown. Damned if the Town had not only plowed the snow
off the streets, they'd taken it away.

The sidewalks were probably cleaned off within a few hours to it. We do not consider snow
to be a disaster. It is a normal weather condition that you learn to deal with. Everyone
has a shovel or snow blower to clear off their driveways and sidewalks. If there is snow on
the road you drive a little slower. The snowplows clear the snow off the roads and
everything looks white and pretty. Once every 50 years of so we get a serious blizzard.
But even that is not a major problem. You stay home and miss a day or two of work until
the snow is cleaned up.

That's what we were hoping for.

By the by, once the snow is piled up alongside the street,
payloaders and dump trucks come along later and haul it all away.
They take it to special gas burners wehre it is melted. And they
pile some of it in high piles in city parks to create sledding
hills. Remains of these hills can still be seen in the parks in
June.

Whatever the Canadians benign view of winter, we moved directly
to Tucson from Montreal and I enrolled in grad school at the
University of Arizona. There must be a number of like-minded
Canadians, given the large numbers of them to be found each
winter in Florida and Arizona.


************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *