So where's the snow?

[pyesetz]

It's October in Canada.  I'm still walking around outside without a coat.  Temps are 10°C above historical norms, but then Global Warming is the "new normal".  Québec now has thriving blueberry farms!

The moving van finally arrived today; no more sleeping on an air mattress!  A few bits of minor breakage (van driver gave me $5 for a broken mirror, apologized for a broken lamp which I managed to fix, etc).  Now I am the proud owner of a house full of packing boxes.

Rogers.ca is disappointing.  I'm supposed to get 7 Mb/s broadband speeds, but I'm actually getting only 1.5-3.5.  Being out in the country has its downside!  The physical plant in my town is old and can't support broadband-telephony or any digital-TV tuner that was made during this century.

I've been here for almost a week and still feel like a fish out of water.  My passport says I'm a permanent resident, but I'm still "an American in Canada", hiding out from the US Fascists.  It seems most of the people on my street are twice my age.  The local hardware store has a cartoon that makes fun of people with college educations who don't know the stuff that really matters.  Maybe I need a local job.  UWaterloo is hiring for a Linux administrator position, but the required qualification is just "a college degree in computer science", so I'm probably overqualified with a master's.

Didn't get anywhere near as much for my NJ house as I had hoped, so the ON house has a lot of debt on it.  Thankfully I moved mucho dinero up from the States back when 1 CAD = 0.97 USD.  Now it's 0.99975 USD.  That makes a difference for a down-payment on a house!

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

At least it isn't record-breaking hot. You missed the really cold weather. It got down to +1.2C on Sept. 16 (which I'm reasonably sure was a record low for that day in Hamilton). :-o It was cold for several days. We kept extra light bulbs and computers on to stay warm.

[pyesetz]

It got down to +1.2C on Sept. 16
Does anybody have a graph of actual temperatures vs. historical averages?  These stats are based on 1961-1990, but things have gotten a lot crazier in the last 20 years.  ISTR that Toronto had many days of -20 at the beginning of 2003.

We kept extra light bulbs and computers on to stay warm.
So what will you do in February?

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Both theweathernetwork.com and weatheroffice.gc.ca let you look up actual temps for several locations for any day in the past few years; the latter gives you the historic weather conditions hourly. But only for a few years - nothing long-term. I don't know about a graph though. And I don't know about historic day by day "normals" either - they only show today's normals on those sites.

So what will you do in February?

Well, the apartment didn't have the heat turned on during summer. I hope it stays on during the winter though. :-)

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

At least it isn't record-breaking hot.

I guess I take that back! Tomorrow's high is forecast to be 27C, and the previous record for Oct. 5 in Hamilton was 25.1C in 2005.

[pyesetz]

Lovely—and I've got at least one more day of cleaning the dust out of the attic (no A/C up there, of course).

Seasonable temperatures are expected to return in a week, says the 14-day.  by then I'll have to figure out what to do with all the stuff in my back yard that needs to go into the shed that I haven't ordered yet.

[danruk.livejournal.com]

You'll be surprised to find that winter and snow here in Toronto doesn't work much differently than the New Jersey (New England/eastern) coastline. In fact, Toronto is jsut a hair further south than Detroit Michigan, believe it... or DONT.

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

*grins* I have a Canadian friend who once tried to persuade me (a Briton) to move to Toronto or Montreal because its winters were "warm". Mind you, at the time it was January, he was living in Athabasca (150km N of Edmonton) and it had been -40°C the previous night, so maybe he had a point!

[pyesetz]

But Detroit is COLD in the winter.  K-W is one degree of latitude further North than Boston, while Cherry Hill NJ was three degrees South, so I moved from a place that was markedly warmer than where I grew up to one that should be a little colder (further North, higher elevation, and inland).  But it was rare to walk around Boston without a coat in October back in 1970-1980.