4:57:00

Sunrise: 10:08 a.m.
Sunset: 15:05 p.m.

It's all uphill from here.

And now, -43

I should note yesterday's photo was taken at -42 C. Today, it is a notch colder. The interesting thing about ice fog is its cumulative effect. In this picture, taken moments ago, you can barely make out the school itself, never mind downtown. If this cold snap lasts through the weekend, I probably won't be able to see across the street, quite literally, and all those trees in the school yard will disappear.


And yes, it is dangerous to drive in these conditions, especially after dark (3 more hours!) so again, staying indoors with some coffee and hockey games (World Junior quarter-finals people) seems like a good plan.

A wee bit nippy, indeed

Canadians are obsessed with the weather. It's right up there with hockey as our national sport, a surefire opening gambit at any cocktail party if you're trying to chat up a stranger or make nice with someone you have nothing in common with. Everyone has an opinion on the weather. Northerners are a particular subset of Canadian obsessive in this area. During the Christmas season especially, when winter is usually at its coldest and the sun barely skims the horizon for a paltry four hours and fifty-seven minutes a day (not that we're counting or anything), we all go a little squirrelly over the weather.

Long-time Northerners can pretty much tell what kind of morning it's going to be by looking out the window when they get up. Cloudy, grey and sombre means warm, -20 at the most. Sunny and clear means cold, probably below -25. And around -40, a phenomenon known as ice fog descends over the community and blankets the trees in hoarfrost as the molecular particles of moisture in the air literally freeze, and hang around making it hard to see across the street.

No matter how long I've lived here, I've never gotten used to -40, and neither has my elderly vehicle. This morning, this is what I saw out my living room windows:



Usually, I can see across the school yard to downtown, but today, it was like downtown got erased overnight. At this point, it seemed logical to abandon my plans to go out at all, brew a nice pot of coffee, and curl up on my couch to watch the Winter Classic hockey game on TV. Now, if it warms up this weekend, I'm all set for a round of small talk.

A Foggy Day, Not Quite London-Town

We don't often have fog up here. Not like the West Coast, or London, or even November in Montreal. Something about the weather conditions just don't line up properly most of the time.

So, you can imagine my surprise this morning to wake up and look out on a lot of...nothing, really. Just a lot of bright grey fog where my neighbourhood should be.

Normally on a Sunday, my inability to see my hand in front of my face outside wouldn't pose much of a problem, as Sunday tends to be a "stay inside and do chores around the house" kind of day. But, given that I was supposed to be heading out for a going-away brunch on this particular morning, the fog was a bit more of an issue. Thankfully, by the time I was actually ready to go, it seemed to have lifted enough to at least drive safely. That was all good and fine uptown, but once I started heading down the hill to Old Town...not so much.

Originally, I thought it might be a good photo opportunity, fog over the lake with some houseboats or something. Unfortunately, the fog was so thick one could barely see the lake, and certainly not the houseboats. In fact, you couldn't see past the first row of boats in the local marina. The houseboats are a couple of hundred metres further out...there.


Still, driving around for a bit did allow me to find some good photo ops of things other than houseboats. Regular boats, for example.


Fog can be a photographer's best friend, or their worst nightmare. It all depends on the look you're going for. For example, normally three boats tied to a dock wouldn't be my first choice of subject. It's kind of blah, the boats are shiny aluminum, there's not much going on. On a foggy day though, when the sun is to one side, most of the colour gets drained out of the picture and it becomes a far more interesting subject. Here, the stillness of the water adds to the effect. Overall, I have to say I really like this one.

Now, in most places, the fog rolls in, it sticks around for a while, and then it clears out for the rest of the day. In...Out. Today though, it kept coming in, moving out, blowing around - generally being unpredictable every five or ten minutes. This constant shifting allowed for some interesting visual opportunities. For example, this morning the shot below wouldn't have been possible, because the sun would have been behind me, so all the camera would have seen was fog, and nothing else. By early afternoon however, the sun had swung around so it was between me and the island. Combine that with the fog being caught midway between blowing in, and rolling out, and we have a sharply focused foreground (love that dock!) with pockets of fog obscuring the island in the middle ground, and a clear sky in the distance. Sweet.

The Radius of a Rainbow

The city that I now call home is located in a sub-Arctic desert, which mostly means we need to run humidifiers in the winter to keep the cat fur from sticking to the walls with all the static, and in the summer, we are largely spared the spectacular, but kind of frightening, thunder and lightning storms I grew up with in hot, humid Montreal.

Global warming however, means shifting weather patterns, and over the past couple of summers, we have slowly but surely been having more thunderstorms. Tonight's however, was even more spectacular than normal, if crazy weather can be seen to be "normal" at all.

It started around 4 p.m., when I could see a sheet of charcoal grey stretching from the horizon up into the equally somber clouds in the North sky. Over the next couple of hours, those clouds rolled in, until the entire sky was charcoal grey. And then those clouds opened, and for roughly an hour the rain pelted down, bouncing off the pavement like nickels, piercing the screen door until the entire patio door track was filled with water, and obscuring my view across the street.

When the rains finally slowed however, I saw something I don't remember ever seeing before - a double rainbow tracing a full 180 degrees in the sky, the inner rainbow almost incandescent, the colours were so vivid. I will always regret not having a camera to capture this astounding sight, but I stood there on the deck of the sailing club for several minutes, watching it fade and shift, even remarking at one point that it was being reflected in the lake, it was so intense. A handful of other people attending the same workshop also stepped outside to take it in while it lasted, and we were commenting about how you usually only see one end of a rainbow, and the arc tends to disappear into a cloud or fade away, and that this was something else entirely.

I was thinking the arc of this particular rainbow was perfectly circular, not stretched out the way they sometimes are, and then I thought, for no particular reason, what is the radius of a rainbow?

I'm pretty sure someone like Descartes has done the math, and figured out the complicated principles of refraction and distance, and the size of the water droplets probably matters too, but somehow all the science diminishes the sheer perfection of nature's beauty, this big, bright, multicoloured arc stretching from the North sky to the South over the massive dark lake, even for a moment shining back up at itself.

And then, like so many other things in nature, it was gone, obscured once more by another wave of rain.