Stereotypical.

So, it's cold. Like, REALLY cold. 

This happens every year, and every year we complain about it loudly. Students beg for a "snow day", which we won't ever have, due to our district inclement weather policy, and then just don't show up when it gets cold. 

Like I said, this happens every year. Part of being Albertan is commenting on weather, but it always amazes me how many people don't behave according to the weather, and then complain. If you come to school in -35 in shorts, you deserve to be cold. If you walk around the university campus with your plaid flannel unbuttoned, no hat, no mitts, and the windchill is -42 (something I witnessed yesterday), the rest of us do NOT want to hear you complain. 

Snow.

This was a coworkers car after school today (she's getting over the flu so I brushed it off for her while I was leaving). So much snow!

We've had strange weather from a balmy week last week, this huge drifting snow day,  to the crazy fog that lead to a 40+ car pile up on the highway (makes this fog look tame). 

why pictures? why must you be so blurry?

But enough of the weather.

Busy weekend, lots of birthdays to celebrate, and Christmas decor to put up. Trying out some new recipes. Nothing I'd write home about yet. Working on my tacky Christmas sweater (more on that in the future). You know. The usual. 

Long weekends.

Perfection.

Somehow, in the marvel of Alberta weather, the August long weekend is always fabulous. And I don't just mean nice weather. It is breath taking.

View from my hammock.

This past weekend was stellar. Hot, calm weather all three days? I mean, come on! Perfect weather to spend out at the lake, waterskiing and floating on the water, or sitting in a hammock. Or, when you positively cannot stand any more sun (as happens a lot for me... the joys of being a pale red head) watching the Olympics and eating blueberries.

Beauty of a sunset.

Beautiful weather, great friends, good food? Heaven on earth.

Windchill.

Thanks Weather Network.
 I was concerned about those few clouds.

So, it's pretty cold outside. And by "pretty cold" I mean "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey". (My father is so eloquent...)

But it's not just cold; it's very windy here in Edmonton, and that means windchill!

Temperature is a measure of the average motion of air molecules. Air particles are always moving around, and the speed they travel depends on their energy. The faster they go, the more energy they have, and the higher the temperature will be.

Windchill is a measure of how cold it "feels". A temperature like we had this morning (-32°C) can feel colder (-42°C) if there is a wind. A windchill of -42 means your body will lose heat as if it were -42°C outside, even if the thermometer only says -32°C.

All objects radiate heat, and our bodies are no exception. This radiated heat warms up the air around our bodies, creating a little buffer between us and the surrounding cooler air (hair and clothes help to trap this warm air next to our bodies).
However, if it is windy, this layer of warm air gets removed by a process known as convection and the windier it is, the faster the process happens, making it feel colder than the temperature alone.

And since you can use convection to cool down inanimate objects as well (think blowing on hot tea) plugging in your car's block heater is an absolute must in this weather!

Wintertime.

Well, yesterday was my brother's birthday. Which means it is offically the Christmas season as far as my family is concerned! We always wait until after his birthday to decorate and all that jazz.

Yesterday the family went to dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House downtown, for what was pretty much the most expensive meal of my life. (And this from the girl who once spent 31$ on a drink in Monaco.) It was fabulous, don't get me wrong, but it's the kind of place where you ask yourself "Should we get the wine, or pay the rent this month?" After we ordered some mouth-watering desserts (of course my mother and I shared the cheesecake), we found out that the restaurant does a birthday dessert, and we got this sampler tray.  Chocolate mousse, berries in cream, and bread pudding in a whiskey sauce. SO. GOOD.


Awesome tree at my parent's house. *

My father really loves to decorate the house for the holiday season. Just last week he turned on the big tree out front, which has almost 1500 lights on it! (For a size comparison... that is my car in the bottom right... and tha lamp post is atleast 25 feet tall!) You can see it from quite a ways away, because it's taller than the neighboring houses.

We finally got snow, but the weather has been really mild. If my life wasn't so busy, I would be outside enjoying it! These snowmen are courtesy of the neighbor kids at my parent's. So adorable.


*Kate has been trying to figure out why some of my pictures won't rotate... I wish I could credit her here, but this one worked all by itself!

Snow.

Ahhh... The first snowfall of the season! (Those of you who are unfamiliar with the Edmonton climate... this is unseasonably late.)

Come February, I will probably be complaining about the snow, but right now the world is coated in a fluffy white layer that makes everything seem magical. As long as you are inside with a nice cup of tea, and not out driving on the roads.

Here's a snippet from my favorite holiday movie, featuring the wonderful Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Bing Crosby himself singing about snow snow snow snow snow!

Sunsets.

One of the strangely lovely things about being in rural Alberta at this time of year is the amount of dust in the air. You wouldn't think that would be a good thing, but it makes for some fabulous reddish/purple sunsets, like the one I tried to capture this past Labour Day weekend...

The problem with trying to capture sunsets is that photographs never do them justice. With the water being mirror flat, the reflections and clouds only added to the beauty. This one was phenomenal...

Lightning.

This light show took place north of Fort Saskatchewan a couple weekends ago. Light pollution interfered a bit, but I found that with a 5 second exposure they didn't come out too bad...

I had the tripod set up in an upstairs window, and just kept depressing the shutter, hoping lightning would strike. (If you wait to see it, it's too late!)

Here is the breakdown on the shots I took... (I won't give you raw data... I took an embarassing number of pictures...)

63%  of the shots... nothing.
25% of the shots... heat lightning which pretty much just illuminates the clouds.
12%  of the shots actually contained visible strikes.
4% of the shots could be considered decent.



This one happened before I got the camera even hooked up to the tripod,
and before I turned out the lights!



This is what happens when you are just getting the zoom worked out...



There were other, more in focus ones,
but these were the biggest and brightest!



Storms.

Early this morning (read 3:45 am) I awoke to something that looked like this...

Photo courtesy of the Weather Network..
last night's storm, but I didn't grab my camera.

Obviously my view was a little different (a mostly empty field out to the highway), but the lightning and thunder were intense! The entire house would rattle almost immediately after lightning illuminated the entire room through the tiny gaps in my curtains. Rain was thundering down. There was even some hail, which devastated my poor herbs (mostly the oregano and basil.. the mint and bergamot seem to be okay).

At one point, I was sitting on my living room couch looking out the window (sleep was clearly not an option) when a huge branch of lightning crashed down, hitting something on the other side of the highway (maybe 1 km away) and almost immediately there was bone-rattling thunder and all the street lights went out.

One of the things I love about those kind of power outtages is that they eliminate a lot of light pollution, and allow you to see the weather for what it really is.

Lightning is caused by a build up in electrical charge in the atmosphere. Storms contain high winds that circulate air quickly, causing air molecules and small hail and water drops to rub against each other, charging them. Air is a very good insulator (doesn't allow current to flow), so good in fact that a huge amount of charge can build up before it releases. When it does release, the lightning doesn't go directly down. Since the air is still an insulator, the lightning first moves down in small steps, seeking the path of least resistance. This is what gives lightning it's jagged appearamce (the branches are called stepped leaders). However, since electricity moves at approximately 50,000 km per second, and the speed of light is 300 000 km per second, it appears to the human eye as an instantaneous process.

Thunder, on the other hand, often has a noticable delay (depending on how far away you are). When lightning strikes, it heats the air up to temperatures that can exceed the surface of the sun, and when air is heated, it expands. The expansion of air causes a pressure wave, which we preceive as sound (a nice deep boom). This pressure wave travels at a much slower speed than the lightning strike (the speed of sound is a much more sedate 350 metres per second), so we see that nice delay. Just like dominoes have a delay when the first is pushed to the last falling down, air molecules take time to bump into each other, and the distance to the lightning strike can be roughly measured by counting the time between the lightning and the thunder.

The storm last night offered very few opportunities to count... you'd barely get to the "one" in "one one thousand" before the reverberating boom!

Numbers referenced from my University text: Weather Studies: Introduction to Atmospheric Science, by Joseph M. Moran.