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Ottawa's Big Dump: Where's my friggin' plow?


Yesterday, here in Ottawa, we experienced a record-breaking snowfall that somehow nobody was prepared for.
It's not like we're in Texas where they've never heard of snow tires. Or boot spikes.
It's not like there isn't enough money in the city budget to get every bleeding snowplough out, 24/7. And the city had fair warning. Snowmegeddon was imminent.
Our smart phones told us so.
Environment Canada issued a special weather statement.
Meh, we thought. It'll pass us by.
That kind of thinking landed Dorothy in Oz.

We've only had one big snow fall all year. The Rideau Canal was only open for one week. Canada Goose jackets went on sale! (Now that didn't happen. Canada Goose can't afford to discount; it costs a lot of money to rip the skin off of mother coyotes!)

I'm sure the people who work for all the private snow shoveling companies have been counting the dollars in their shoeboxes. Little snow fall means little work, and more money for them. So most of them must have been in Florida yesterday, because I see no evidence of them on our street.
Oh wait, that's because the big bad snowploughs never showed up.

The big dump threw our city for a loop yesterday.
There were city buses littered everywhere. Cab drivers stopped menacing citizens going to the airport and turned off their cell phones.
And the much lauded Where's My Plow? app didn't work at all. Maybe that's because the snow workers didn't even start to plough the streets until 8 p.m. last night.
It's mid-morning, and we still can't get out of our driveway because our street looks like this.




It's not like we live in the boonies; we live at the corner of St. Laurent Blvd. and Connery in the middle of the friggin' city yet my son couldn't get his car out this morning to go to work.
And Scott has to work at 2 p.m. and he might not get out, either.
Maybe I'm a bit spoiled, but I can't help but wonder why the city couldn't get its act together. We have the tools, we have the technology.
And maybe, just maybe if the fellars started ploughing, say a couple hours after the snow started, we wouldn't be in this mess.
But there's a larger question, here.
Why do Ottawans forget how to navigate winter?
Is the human response to weather the same as a mother's response to childbirth?
I'm gonna have another baby, not remembering that last time my child took my uterus and pulled it over my head!
We seem to have a sunny kind of amnesia when it comes to weather.
Because we had a balmy first part of the winter, we didn't consider that winter was just saving up all its glory to kick the shit out of us just before spring.
Too bad it didn't occur to us.
It's like Justin Trudeau has gotten into our heads.
Sunny, Sunny Days.
Oh well, perhaps I'll get to the gym by the end of the week.
Thank goodness, I work at home.
I'll just stay here until it melts.





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