This city is funny

Victorians are used to life without weather. Okay, so it rains in the wintertime. And doesn't rain -- at all -- in the summer. That's pretty much it. No wind. Hardly any fog. No such thing as lightning. Many people here live outdoors, and many own ancient and rickety buildings with no level of weather-proofing, because there's no such thing as weather here.

Or, to be more precise, there was no such thing as weather here, until a few years ago. Climate change is really apparent here, as we are going through our second year of unprecedented windstorms, which I think many thought were impossible in Canada's Most Sheltered City. Last week, heavy winds tore apart trees, ripped off roofs, and knocked out the power for a big chunk of this city (but not including us, thankfully). When we went outside, we noticed tree branches on our front lawn, and then realised that we couldn't see any tree that matched those branches on our block. When we got to church, the lawn was littered with roofing tiles that didn't come from the church's roof.

But then the wind died down and people got back to their usual routines. We noticed that, this week, a bunch of people have hung big Christmas tree ornaments from the branches of their leafless deciduous trees. Chris said, as I was driving him to work this afternoon, "They'd better hope that the wind doesn't come back."

And wouldn't you know it, it's back. The gusts were rattling the pictures on my wall, and Evironment Canada's forecasting "damaging winds" tonight.

We'll see what things look like tomorrow morning.

Edited to add: oh, and the power's flickering again. What are the odds that we get another power outage tonight? (The problem is that we have all above-ground power lines, with really low hanging and swingy lines, and this has apparently never been a problem before, and so the wind just keeps taking down power lines.)