2008: Week 13

We're now a quarter of the way through 2008! A quiet week here, with few interesting events. Monday was a normal work day, although I discovered the hard way that it's not a normal work day for the post office :( Calgary has very few real post offices - they are mostly outlets inside Shoppers Drug Mart, a chain of stores somewhat similar to Priceline in Australia. The stores are often open 24 hours, although the post office counter has more limited hours.

Our weekend adventures involved trawling garage sales and a visit to a different supermarket. The garage sales were pretty poor overall, although I managed to pick up a retro metal bucket I will use to grow herbs on the balcony when it finally warms up. The supermarket exploration was a revelation. Since moving away from Ithaca I have really missed Wegmans, the greatest supermarket ever. The new downtown Coop in Calgary is not as good, but it does stock a better range than our local store, and has a good selection of prepared salads for lazy days.

Oh, and did I mention we had 10cm of snow last night?

Best of the week
- Watching the French film Angel A.
- A longer than usual conversation with my parents.
- Finally finding a French exercise book with answers!

Worst of the week
- Waiting for Spring.
- Feeling restless.

[relatively] warm

The temperature in Calgary had crept up to a balmy -15C. And I do mean balmy - after a few days at -30C it feels quite warm. I'm still surprised how quickly I adapt each year. I remember wearing a floor length wool coat in Sydney on days where the temperature was probably never below 5C, and feeling cold. Now I wear a shorter coat and less layers on much colder days (although I've resigned myself to beanies and gloves which I NEVER would have worn in Australia).

At home we've been battling some randomly frozen pipes. The hot water is fine, but we currently have no cold water feeding the shower (the bath is OK again after hot-water-only evening when I waited over an hour for the bath to cool enough to get in). It's all a bit of a mystery; we can see the pipes in the basement, 9 of them running in a bundle. Somewhere as they run through the house (maybe through the unheated garage?) some of them have frozen while the adjacent pipes are fine. Go figure.

Talking about the weather is such a cliché that I feel a little bad having mentioned it so often lately. Sorry for the string of monotonous posts...