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Waiting on winter

When you live in Prince George and in the frozen north, you become obsessed with the weather. Conversations about the weather bring us closer together as a community.
Megan Kuklis

When you live in Prince George and in the frozen north, you become obsessed with the weather. Conversations about the weather bring us closer together as a community. Around this time of year, the citizens of this great city start to watch the weather bulletins on the news, check the weather forecast on their smart phones and ask their neighbours what they have heard about the snow. The cold brings us together.

If you were born in Prince George and grew up here, you will remember trick-or-treating in the snow every year (except for that one time) and having to squeeze into your Halloween costumes because it was freezing cold outside. Over the last decade, we haven't seen snow on Halloween that I can remember. In Prince George, you can always count on snow at Thanksgiving (except for the last few years) and it would be a fool's bet that we could make it to December without a big dump of snow (except that one time we almost didn't have snow at Christmas).

There are weather absolutes that the locals can count on. The summer was nice therefore the winter will be awful. Except, as of this writing, we don't have any snow yet and we're starting to get nervous. No snow yet means that everyone has enough time to avoid putting on their snow tires. No snow yet means that, as a community, we are holding our collective breaths and we are waiting, waiting, waiting for the inevitable snowfall. No snow yet means that we have more time to complain about the exceptionally poor snow removal job the City did last year rather than complaining about how they are doing this year. No snow yet means that my coastal-born husband is the happiest person in all of Prince George. At least, he was until we discovered that we had to replace six out of eight snow tires on our two vehicles.

The ridiculous winter last year in our house was challenging. We had a toddler and a newborn at home with a sleep-deprived mom and dad completely trapped because we couldn't leave our driveway, because the City only plowed our road three times the entire winter! The only way my husband could go to work was by the grace and hard work of our awesome neighbours who plowed the entire street. Otherwise, no one on our street was going to work ever and we all would have starved to death.

At the end of last winter, we finally fixed our snow plow (it stopped snowing - you're welcome) and we swore that we would buy better winter tires. Well, this year, we did and now we are waiting for the snow to fall because, this year, we are prepared. For the first time ever, I am driving around in studded winter tires. If you've never driven on studded tires when there isn't any snow yet, it sounds and feels like your vehicle is wearing tap shoes. Now I'm going to rip up the hill by our house (safely) instead of praying there isn't anyone else there because if you stop, you are screwed.

Because we are prepared this winter, maybe my husband is right and it won't snow. My apologies if we're wrong.