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It's Sunday January the 4 around 12:08PM and

Vancouver Winter Wonderland Day 23

(Photo by Stephen Dyrgas at Flickr)

Oh what fun. It's still snow-y-ville out there, and while we are still off the record amounts, its been a white couple of weeks. Sure it's stopped after yesterday's mini-dump, but this is more snow than we've seen in a long while. It's gorgeous as it is falling, and nice for that day, afterwards, when it melts, gets dirty, or in the case of some trash neighbours of mine they let their dog piss in it (really, couldn't take the dog down stairs and away from the common walkways? That's just plain rude.

In other news Frances Bula sheds some light on how the city deals with the snow during an exchange with Vision Councillor Raymond Louie. "he city ended up spending $937,000 from its 2008 budget for snow clearing in the last few weeks of December. (Raymond didn’t say it, but I will: Good thing council didn’t vote to put more money from the contingency fund into the homelessness plan, as David Cadman had suggested!"

I found the idea that Vancouver has only 47 snow ploughs very interesting, almost as much as how much it would cost to plough side streets. Fascinating. And don't worry we're adding 5 more for the Olympics - VANOC thinks of everything!

And while we are on the topic of all things weather and snow - my absolute least favorite blogging right after cat blogging and blogging about social media - its a good time to link to a few interesting articles about global warming.

The first is a Telegraph article by Christopher Booker that had this to offer:

"Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects."

The 2nd, more unlikely, is this Harold Ambler piece, also in an unlikely place, The Huffington Post. Ambler is accepting an apology from Al Gore on climate change that is required reading out here in the left coast of Canada. Part of the fun is reading the comments after the article as people don't like to read such things as the debunking of Al 'The Pope of Green' Gore.

"Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that "the science is in." Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind."

UPDATE: And really, did it need to snow yet again this afternoon/evening? Honestly.