SLEEPY

I’m not working this week and I unexpectedly slept in until 1:30pm today. I did stay up pretty late the night before but I usually find it difficult to sleep in past noon in my old age. Who knew I had it in me? I must have been very tired.

Sleeping in this late meant I had a very late start to my day. I had to rush a bit to make it to my massage appointment this afternoon. There’s a really nice spa that’s about a five minute walk from where I live.

After my massage, I went back home and just laid down on the couch until it was time to get some dinner. After dinner, I went back on my couch because I was feeling tired and I fell asleep. I don’t know if I was just still so tired or that the massage was so relaxing that I wanted to sleep more.

Anyways, I need to get up earlier tomorrow and not sleep so late.

WILD

The crazy weather has continued here in the greater Vancouver area. At the end of the week, we were dealing with significant accumulations of snow and freezing temperatures that went into the double negative digits. Late Friday evening, that all switched as the freezing rain turned into regular rain. The temperatures rose rapidly, going well above freezing.

To say it was regular rain is a bit of an understatement. It rained heavily from late Friday to well into Saturday evening. If my car was reading it correctly, it might have reached 10 degrees Celsius at one point on Saturday afternoon. The combination of the warm temperatures and massive amount of rain meant that a significant amount of the snow on the ground melted. This was great because nearly all the roads were bare and free of snow by Saturday afternoon. This was wild because just a day before, it was chaos on the roads. Unfortunately, this influx of water from the sky and the melting snow meant that flooding was a concern in some areas.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a wild swing in temperature and precipitation types in such a short time. It’s difficult to describe but the air went from being very dry to basically humid. On Saturday, it felt like the air was heavy with moisture everywhere you went. The mirrors in my parkade were dripping with condensation. It seemed like everything was just wet and moist no matter where you looked.

It’s now Sunday and it also rained today as well. About 48 hours ago, the entire city was covered in snow. Now, as I look outside my window, I’m having trouble seeing any evidence it snowed at all. It looks like a regular, traditional wet Vancouver Christmas.

The rest of the week calls for rain. Tomorrow the high is supposed to be a balmy 11 degrees Celsius. The lows are going to be well above freezing. This is the type of weather I’m used to for winter. I hope it stays.

MORE SNOW

It snowed again late this evening but it appears to have stopped for now. It’s hard to tell exactly how much snow got added to the existing amount. It was definitely enough that all the roads that were clear and bare earlier were covered again with a decent amount.

Some people are reporting that while the snow has stopped, it has been replaced with frozen rain. I’m not sure if that is happening where I live, since it’s dark and I don’t want to venture outside in the freezing cold to find out.

If this is all the snow that will fall until Christmas Day, we might be ok but it’s still early and there’s lot of time for it to start snowing again.

IMPRESSIVE

Late on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning, the greater Vancouver area had a snowstorm that brought several centimetres of snow. We were kind of lucky to have the snow fall on the weekend as there were less people on the road and it gave municipalities almost a full day of snow clearing before the Monday morning and evening commutes.

Monday did not bring trouble-free commuting unfortunately, there were some delays for transit and YVR airport was chaotic. It was still miles better than the last snowstorm though. The bridges in the area weren’t closed and I didn’t see vehicles lining up to get home at 3am still.

On Monday evening, after most people had gone home from work, another snowstorm arrived and dumped a huge amount snow all over. I live in a low elevation but even then, it looked like we got 12-14 inches of snow. It was much worse at higher elevations. Roads were either passable to downright dangerous depending on municipality and if you were driving on the highway.

When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I barely saw any vehicles on the road. Amazingly, it stayed like that for the entire day and into the evening. Normally, I start to see rush hour traffic start to back up around 3pm. At 4pm, I struggled to even see more than a handful of cars in any direction. It seemed like everyone just stayed at home on Tuesday. This is a lot of snow for Vancouver and no one is used to this much snow in this city.

What also sucks is that the temperatures are frighteningly cold for Vancouver as well. Cold for Vancouver is normally a degree or two below freezing. As I write this, it is -11 degrees Celsius. This is way outside the normal range of cold for this city. Just to put this in perspective, Montreal and Toronto are currently warmer than Vancouver. Anchorage, Alaska is just as cold as Vancouver, despite being several hundreds of kilometres closer to the north pole.

It’s too cold and there is too much snow on the ground. It’s making it difficult to get anywhere, no matter what form of transportation you’re using, from walking to flying. It all sucks.

As if it wasn’t bad enough, the forecast calls for another 10 to 20 cm of snow to fall from Thursday to Saturday, with freezing rain following the snow. I get the feeling many Christmas plans will be put into doubt but this new storm, possibly even mine.

HANDLED

During my lunch break, I went across the street to the dollar store and bought a $6 pair of pliers so I could remove the nut holding my busted toilet bowl handle in place. Once that was done, it was easy to remove the whole handle assembly. With that out of the way, it was another minute of fiddling to get the new handle assembly in place.

I had a choice to get a white handle or a chrome one. I went with the chrome one because it matched what I had before and I also like shiny things. I probably should have replaced it much sooner. For a long time, the handle felt “mushy” when I went to flush, like I could press down on the handle quite a distance and nothing would happen. Only in the last 10% of the travel would it feel like the flush was starting.

The new handle feels “crisp” and responsive. The flush happens almost as soon as you move it, like it’s on a hair trigger. It feels good.

I invite all my readers to come urinate and/or defecate in my toilet bowl and feel the excellence yourself.

TOILET TROUBLES

On late Friday evening, the toilet bowl handle mechanism in my bathroom broke. This meant that if I wanted to flush my toilet, I had to take the top off the tank and then manually pull the lever. Needless to say, this is a huge hassle if you wanna flush the toilet.

A combination of being lazy and having to get ready for my niece’s birthday party on Saturday meant that I couldn’t get a replacement part on that day. On Sunday, I had much more free time, so I managed to get the part in the afternoon, even though it snowed heavily in the morning.

I thought I had lots of time to do the repair, so I left it until after dinner time. It was at that point I realized that I didn’t have a wrench big enough to remove the existing but broken mechanism. At this point, I wasn’t about to go outside again in the cold and snow to look for a new wrench.

I’m about to go bed and I just urinated. I’m still having to take the top off the tank and pull the lever to flush. I better get that new wrench tomorrow.

HOLIDAZE

I’m taking some extra time off for the holidays, so I officially have one week left of work before the break. My last day of work for 2022 is next Wednesday and I’m predicting a lot of people will be checked out next week. A lot of meetings have been cancelled for next week, so it seems like it will be a laid back three days.

LUMP SUM

I scheduled a lump sum payment towards my mortgage today. Next Friday, $10,000 will come out of my bank account to pay down my outstanding balance. I’m on a variable rate mortgage and stupidly, I didn’t lock into a fixed rate mortgage several months ago when it made sense. In the last year or so, the Bank of Canada has raised the prime interest rate steadily. It’s at the point now where doesn’t make sense to keep my money in a savings account because the interest rate on my mortgage far outstrips what I get in said savings account.

I haven’t made a lump sum payment in many years because it made more sense to keep my money elsewhere, where it could make more money for me. With the higher interest rates now, paying down debt has a higher priority. Even if the prime rate stays the same, I am likely going to make another lump sum payment in 2023, probably before the summer.

In a year or two, we might be getting into the territory where I think about paying off my entire mortgage if I liquidate a few investments. I hope I can be so lucky.