Snow. Again. Maybe.

Happy near-the-end-of-February, everyone!

Here we sit, waiting for winter to end, and it seems to be going out with a bang. We are cold once again, after being reasonable for quite a while. The temperatures have dropped to 0° C or below at night, and are not all that much warmer during the days.

And as the subject line implies, there’s a threat of snow for tomorrow (Saturday). But just how much snow is really not clear.

This highlights my frustration with weather forecasts for the Vancouver area. For several days now the weather app I use — the best one I have been able to find — has warned of some snow on Saturday, but not a lot. As of last night it says 4–6 cm was likely starting in the afternoon and continuing through the night. OK, fine.

But the very same app has also been sharing a winter weather warning from Environment Canada saying that metro Vancouver and the surrounding areas — going all the way to Whistler and east a fair bit as well — are due to get 10–30 cm of snow in that same time frame.

For over a day the app and the statement wildly disagreed with each other.

I just checked again, and now the app says we are going to get 5–10 cm of snow tomorrow. The warning remains unchanged at 10–30 cm.

Update: While editing this post I got an alert on my phone. Environment Canada now says snowfall in our area will be 15–25 cm with local amounts up to 35 cm. That much snow — if it actually happens — will completely shut down all of Vancouver for a day or two.

I have complained repeatedly about the accuracy of weather predictions in our area, and this shows why. We are just 24 hours from when this snowfall should start and the various weather predictions are still not in agreement.

Even worse, past experience tells me that tomorrow might bring a heat wave with temperatures of 45° C and a sandstorm. That’s just about as likely as any of the snowfall forecasts being correct.

I don’t know what makes predicting the weather so difficult in this part of the world, but the accuracy of the forecasts is terrible. I’m surprised we still have any VFR pilots still alive. By now they should all have taken off at some point when the forecast said the weather was perfect and wound up flying into the side of a mountain or splashing down 100 km out to sea in the fog and hail that actually arrived.

But enough of that, you’re here to see what I accomplished last week, right? I just know you are, and I cannot disappoint, so…

That’s the first gallery wall in the living room rehung, and the furniture returned to its proper place. This was waiting on painting the rest of the baseboard and radiators in there, and the hallway (off to the left side of the photo above), both of which are now finished.

Well, mostly finished. I still have some baseboard to paint, but enough of it is done that we could reassemble at least that much of the house. And it looks a lot better with a fresh coat of paint.

So progress continues, slowly. I have more drywall repairs to make — this time in the kitchen — and then I need to paint in there. But note that “drywall repairs” doesn’t mean someone punched a hole in the wall. Instead, the idiots who last did any drywall work on the house simply didn’t fully embed their corner beads in drywall mud. The result is that the paper or metal edges are visible in some places, which is really annoying. I am covering those up as best I can, in an attempt to hang onto the final shreds of my sanity. It’s a losing battle, but I’m trying.

The goal for the coming week is to patch those areas that need it in the kitchen, paint some more baseboard, and perhaps paint some of the kitchen as well.

As you can see, my life is really exciting.

But I can’t leave it there. In the past week I saw something talking about how the big image generating AI programs have trouble with hands because they don’t have a three dimensional understanding of what they are. And of course hands are pretty complicated. As a result there are a lot of AI generated images of hands with the wrong number of fingers and so on. I decided to play with that a bit. As a result, I give you this:

The description I fed Dall-E was: “A nightmare image composed only of hands.”

When asked for the right thing, it seems Dall-E can actually generate what you want.

Don’t look at that too closely, though. You might have difficulty sleeping.

In other news, I have registered to vote here in Canada. Well, technically I was automatically registered to vote in federal elections when my citizenship came through, but I am now also registered in the province of British Columbia. So I can do my civic duty whenever the next elections come along. I feel good about that.

I know, it was a slow news week here. I am sorry.

Someday I will do something more exciting. I promise!

Until then — or next week — stay warm and safe!