Monday, February 4, 2013

Our Edmonton AB weather

Since 1974, I've lived in St. Albert, Alberta, which is a suburb of Edmonton, our provincial capital. Until 1964 when I graduated from high school, I lived in the Peace River country of Alberta; then lived in Edmonton.

This winter has been a very long one in that snow and cold started in October and really hit in November when I returned from Ontario to a blizzard with a record snowfall. (My BIL couldn't pick me up at the airport as arranged because they had 16" of snow in their driveway!)

That said, we've had an interesting winter with some near-record cold days and, I'm thinking, some near-record warm days. Although it's been a long winter, it's been quite bearable as we seem to be getting several days of VERY cold weather interspersed with a few days of unseasonably warm weather. For example, the other day with the wind chill, the temperature was -40 (the same in both celsius and fahrenheit) and today was +5 celsius (40 F).

The cold days brought back memories of the winter of 1969 when we had 26 consecutive days of temperatures below 0 Fahrenheit (-17.7C). I had actually done an online search for this information the other day and couldn't find it but yesterday the Edmonton Journal's "In the History" page highlighted it and showed a graphic of the certificate that the Journal awarded to survivors of those very cold days.  Keep in mind that the temperatures shown on the certificate are in Fahrenheit - Canada had not yet gone metric/celsius. (Mine is tucked away somewhere.)

On the other hand, this is a picture of my Mom and Dad taken on Christmas Day of 1998 or 1999 in our driveway in St. Albert.

Sorry it's so poor but it's mounted on a 1" piece of wood and doesn't scan very well.
It's our weather and we live with it...

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