Mostly Weather
Hello everyone! Another short post this time. Maybe next week I will be back in the saddle as usual, but who knows. To keep you amused, here’s a photo of Tinkerbelle contemplating the weather:
I’ve tried to catch her with her chin on the window sill many times. Only this morning did I finally get the shot. Usually she lifts her head when I get the camera out, silly dog.
While I will mostly discuss the weather in this post, I want to share something else first. Last time I mentioned a “knock off” sriracha sauce I’d see here. One of my readers — Sarah — is a librarian, and she’d seen something about this in the past. After some research she sent me this link:
It’s an interesting read, but it will probably set your teeth on edge if you are either an intellectual property lawyer or hold an MBA. Based on the article, I think the bottle I found up here in Canada would violate the trademarks Huy Fong holds in the USA. Alas, I have no clue about the situation in Canada. Perhaps they never registered those trademarks outside the USA and the bottle I found is thus completely legal.
And of course how the knock off tastes is another matter entirely, one I cannot address.
In any case, thank you Sarah!
On to the weather…
As you know, it’s been cold, snowy, and rainy here. I think the locals — I can’t yet think of myself that way, despite being here over four years — are sick of the snow, in particular. In our neighbourhood it’s made an awful mess of the roads, and most of us have no place to put it as it builds up. Particularly if you’re trying to find a place for snow from the street, which is full of road salt. You don’t want that on your plants.
In truth, many of us have been using salt on our sidewalks as well. I try to keep that off the plants too, which means I have been piling snow up along the street for days now. It’s ugly, but it is also melting away, finally. We had a lot of rain last night which helped.
In one of my shovelling excursions (which seem to be the only thing I have done outdoors in forever at this point) I saw this:
Are those rabbit tracks? I have never seen a rabbit in the area, but it seems they are around. The little spots are water drops from a tree overhead.
To show just how cold it’s been, here’s what one of our skylights looked like during the worst of it:
I was up on the roof to check the condition of our downspouts since we were due for a warm(er) spell and some rain. I didn’t want them iced over and thus causing water to find unusual ways into the house.
While up there, I also noted this:
That’s one of the lousy, aluminum frame windows we have. All the windows in this house have aluminum frames, and they’re terrible. The ice on the siding of the house below the window is water that came out of the weep holes at the bottom of the window frame, dripped down, and froze.
Why is that water there? Two reasons:
- First, because these windows don’t seal well. Rain can sneak in at the top, run around the window itself, and drip out the weep holes at the bottom. If water can do that, imagine what warm air does.
- Second, because they get so cold they condense lots of water inside on the glass and frame. That drips out as well.
This cold snap — with many days in a row where the temperature never rose above 0° C — has pointed out just how bad these windows are. We knew they were a problem when we bought the house, but we got through last winter without too much trouble. I did have to wipe them down most cold mornings to avoid mould, but we didn’t feel like they were all that bad as far as heat loss was concerned. Turns out we were wrong. We learned that the hard way.
And global warming means we’re going to see more cold snaps like this one, as well as more really hot weather in the summers. New windows will do us well on both fronts, so the next major house effort is going to involve getting many (if not all) of them replaced. I’ll start the detailed research on that next week, though I have begun it already in various ways. More on that in time.
Anyway, that is what we have been doing for the last couple of weeks: freezing. As I write this we are supposed to go below zero again tonight, but after that we’re above freezing for many days in a row. The combination of warmer temperatures and more rain will probably get rid of all the snow, which will be a nice change. Of course, our weather forecasts are so inaccurate that we might instead have blizzard conditions most of the time, followed by a typhoon. I’ll update you next week.
That’s it for this time. Keep safe!