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It’s been a long week and I am tempted to eat an entire pizza for dinner tomorrow.

So it turns out that the expectations of people at work this week are pretty low. No one bothered me too much today and everyone is very low key. The rust of the holidays seems to be very thick on people. I can only imagine that holiday eating has slowed everyone’s brains, including mine. Several people expressed that they forgot how to do their jobs today, which is awesome.

It should be an ok, short, and easy week. Is it Friday yet?

Well, since I didn’t take any extra time off, I’m headed back to the old digital coal mines tomorrow to try to carve out an honest living. If there is one consolation for returning to work this week, it’s that a ton of people decided to take the rest of the week off. With so many people still on break, many of the weekly meetings that I’m part of have been cancelled for this week. I checked my calendar and my whole week is essentially devoid of meetings. Another great thing is that, as far as I know, there aren’t any important tasks that I need to do for this week. All signs point towards this week being a light and easy one, mirroring the week before the holiday break started. Not that I would do such things, but if one wanted to say, start later in the morning and perhaps end a bit earlier in the afternoon, one could possibly do that without penalty.

Well, it’s time for bed.

Unfortunately, I have to go back to work on Tuesday. I’m glad New Year’s Day landed on a Sunday because I have the Monday as the one last day of the holidays.

I can’t complain about the last week and a half. I slept in almost all of the days. Things got extreme on some nights where I didn’t sleep until 5am. One day, I didn’t wake up until 1:30pm. That was common when I was younger but as a senior citizen now, it’s really difficult for me to sleep that late now. I played a lot of video games, finishing two and starting two new ones. I tried really hard to eat somewhat decently but it’s the holidays and that’s not really a time known for healthy eating. One evening I ate almost an entire medium pizza by myself. I left two slices for the next day. In terms of sweets, I was doing awesome until I got a box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts for Christmas. Those are my favourite nuts and they’re just like crack cocaine. I ate about 400g of that chocolate and nuts before my willpower kicked in and stopped myself.

I am proud to say that I did some exercise throughout the holidays. I went on some long walks and at home, I still managed to do some cardio and weight lifting. It’s so much easier to get exercise when you don’t have a job to worry about. Just another reason that working sucks.

Well, I’m looking forward to my last day of the holidays tomorrow. I think I’ll go buy a lottery ticket as part of my day tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As someone who readily admits to not liking board games, I am that guy in this video. I’m not even ashamed of it.

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.