Weather and Brains

[dewline]

You've seen this sort of rant before.



This week has been another of those times where the weather that you expect to endure is upended by the reality of the weather you actually have to cope with. The results have become part of the winter rituals of Ottawa.

More rain, warmer than expected temperatures, slush and ice more often than snow, pools of melt-water that don’t or can’t drain off to points elsewhere as you need them to. You’ve all seen it, and whether you live on the side streets of Centretown – how many people really admit to the existence of an “Upper Town” outside of the history books? – or out in the suburbs of Orléans, Manotick and Stittsville, the end result is the same.

After the melt, comes once more the freeze and there you are flat on whatever you’ve landed upon. You’re nursing your pains, great or small, and your dignity’s left well behind you. Also, you should be grateful should you find yourself on your butt with no more than a bruise. Youth was never a guarantee against breaking the pelvis into at least two pieces, so far as I know, and never will be.

For myself, it’s the brain I worry more about.

It’s partly survival’s sake and partly vanity. I like having a working brain, and the one thing worse than getting the brain bashed in would probably be going out due to glioblastoma multiforme. After watching Dad forced to the Final Exit due to his own metastasis from the kidneys to the brain and elsewhere? The brain was the second place the doctors found it, once he'd had his first stroke.1

Nightmare Zone.

But I started out with weather, didn’t I? Yep.

I went for a smallish pile of groceries yesterday afternoon. On each half of that round-trip, there were a half-dozen occasions where I nearly ended up landing badly. Let’s call it that. Normal striding was not an option, especially not on the side street where I live. Nor on the section of bike path connecting my side street to one of the neighbourhood feeder streets.

Most of the sidewalk on that feeder street was ploughed. But, the odd temperatures and the rain made that sidewalk problematic as well. Walking on the street itself was certainly an option. It would’ve been an uncomfortable fit, though. So, I took the Normal Risks.

The fact that you’re either hearing me read this rant or reading the text of it confirms that I survived whatever mistakes I made by making that milk run. This is true.

Also true: the weather’s improved today to the point where footing on the streets and sidewalks is also improved.

But that’s not going to last. No weather, good or ill, lasts.


1- The first was the lungs, for which he'd already been getting treatment off and on for several years.)

Comments

[dewline.livejournal.com]

In my neighbourhood, it's more sand than salt these days that gets put to use on those streets that have sidewalks at all. I'm still on one that doesn't, one of the hundreds of dubious legacies of pre-Amalgamation times where the municipalities outside the Greenbelt balanced their books by making side streets do without such "luxuries".

[jkahane.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I don't consider sand/salt these days for de-icing streets and walkways as a "luxury" in this climate.