Cold 🥶 

It's minus 21 in Vernon for the second day in a row. As I am still trying to allow for a bit of space between stimulus and response, I will not rush to declare that for someone who lived most of her life in Thunder Bay and Wakefield that's nothing to write home about. And resolution aside, I'm old now and have been living in the Okanagan long enough to have changed in more ways than just trying to think before I declare; -21 to be cold 🥶. 

It was about zero on Sunday when I parked the car after skiing, snow was melting on all the windows. By about 10pm the temperature had dropped to -10 and by morning it was -22. After doing physiotherapy exercises and enjoying a slow breakfast, I bundled up and went out to shovel. There hadn't been much snow overnight, but the plough guy for the clinic next door had hemmed my car in with relatively big, hard lumps, so I had to get my special shovel out of the trunk. It was then that I discovered that 3 of the 5 car doors were frozen shut. Fortunately, the trunk, where that shovel was, was not one of them. I didn't need to use the car on Monday, so after clearing around it I left it and returned to the house to hibernate. 

I didn't return to the car until about 11:00 this morning. The temperature was still around -21, but by then I was able to open the driver's door. I started the car and left it running as I scraped the thick blobs of ice from the windows. As I did so, I thought about sublimation, a word I learned in high school science. That subject taught me some of the best words: nictitating membranes in fish, etc. and exophthalmic goitre; the picture of a sufferer was frightening though. At any rate, I think that sublimation might explain why the driver's side door finally opened after a few more hours of freezing cold had transformed the solid ice around it to gas with no intervening liquid liquid state. 🥶😂. So allowing a bit of space between stimulus and response might work for opening my car doors as well as my big mouth. Now that's growth and freedom. 😹

On a much more serious note, the following cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon in 'The Chronicle Herald' of Jan. 11, 2020 is the best statement I've seen so far of the self interest and mendacity that is behind the tragedy of the downing of the Ukrainian Airlines plane that killed so many Canadians and others.