Oh Winnipeg, how strange a city you are, full of fluctuating weather patterns and strange, spacious, wind-blown landscapes. Last week, while I unfortunately suffered from a child-borne disease (usually called 'the flu'), the weather was magnificent and on Remembrance Day, which is a holiday in Manitoba, Rosetta and I went siteseeing in St. Boniface and The Forks, if only to get out of the house and into the loveliness. Two hours was about all I could manage, though, having had a fever and whatnot.

But it was so worth it. I visited a Cathedral that had been ruined in a fire and rebuilt as a modern structure that incorporated the ruins to great effect, its cemetary boasting the grave of Louis Riel. Photos will be made available at my deviantart gallery in the near future, as in probably today or tomorrow. Also, we browsed through some of the boutiques in the Forks, which is kind of like Toronto's Distillery, in that it was a bunch of warehouses that someone decided would make a good tourist site and renovated, rather than simply allowing human habitation to naturally take over. I found some cool clothing, which I can't afford to buy, and there seem to be some neat cafes and restaurants at which I cannot afford to eat. But the people watching was nice and I had a good time.

The temperature began dropping over the weekend and yesterday came with a weather warning and watch for snow. And boy, has it snowed. Wow. It's not that I'm unaccustomed to large dumps of the white stuff, it's that I'm not accustomed to it at this point in the year. And, there is every chance that this snow will still be on the ground come Christmas. Apparently, once the ground gets covered, Winnipeg goes into deep freeze for five months. At the moment, Winnipeggers are relearning how to drive in poor road conditions and white-out and traffic is crawling. Cars that are low to the ground are acting as snowplows, if they're moving at all. The buses slide and bump against the curbs and get stuck in drifts that require 'rocking' to escape.

Highways all surrounding the city are closed. Schools have closed. People are out shovelling and those who have managed to get into work (though it took about an hour and a half for me to do so) are mostly preoccupied with the weather, rather than getting anything done. People here take an obscene amount of pride in their winters and are buzzing about with delerious and demented pleasure at how long it will take them to shovel tonight, or how much snow will end up covering the ground, and how this storm doesn't even begin to approach that one last year, or the year before, or whenever, when the snow came up to the roofs of cars. I'm just impressed that the whole department has made it in.

I, on the other hand, am considering bailing on work early today, if only to avoid the slush-hour commuter hell that will inevitably follow. I need to visit the walk-in clinic, anyway, because I need my prescription refilled and I also have to do a smidgen of food shopping. Yes, I realise this is kind of bad timing, but I'd rather do it today when it's not frigid out than tomorrow, when they're saying it'll be a whopping high of -10C.

Is it too soon to start feeling Christmassy?