...and what will little robin do then, poor thing?
The picture above is a zoom-in of our pond. It's frozen over again, and the heater to allow some oxygen to get through the ice to the koi now provides a small respite to a robin who didn't come north to deal with all this poop.
This weekend has been a little hard to take, but I also think we may have dodged a bullet, especially compared to some of the things I've been hearing elsewhere in southern Ontario.
On Friday, we listened in disbelief as Environment Canada warned of a potentially "historic" ice storm affecting southern Ontario. The warnings came and went, and then came back, so we decided to stock up on supplies, and prepare to stay indoors for the weekend. By Saturday morning, it was clear we were having some weather. At first the ice came as pellets, such that it felt like it was raining wet sand. It didn't coat any branches, which is a good thing, but it settled on the driveway and our sidewalks with the consistency of cement.
Sunday was substantially worse. More and deeper ice pellets. Then, as evening set in, the classic freezing rain arrived. The wind picked up, and I was sure we'd be seeing power outages.
As Monday dawned, it was too slick to move. The schools wisely cancelled classes, with everybody shocked that such a thing was possible on April 16 in southern Ontario. Ida our electric car did not come with winter tires (we'll install these later in the year), and its approach to encountering slick conditions in our driveway was to simply stop the wheels turning. Fascinating. So, we decided to stay off the roads as much as possible, at least until the plows were through.
The city has been cleaning itself up. The garbage and recycling people did heroic work picking up ice-laden waste at the side of the road this morning. I was amazed. And Kitchener-Waterloo seems to have escaped any power outages or tree damage.
Even so, every local that I know is in mourning at winter's last gasp. It just doesn't seem fair or right, especially after the earlier signs of spring-like weather that we saw last month.
But while April is capricious, spring is coming. We see the sun on Wednesday, and temperatures start climbing into the teens this weekend. We may finally be leaving the minuses behind.