It’s the start of the New Year and I can’t wait to get going. I mean really going.  It’s a tad difficult to burst out of the gates when your body is frozen stiff, ultimately numbing the brain.  It has been suggested by some that I suffer from brain “polar vortex” in August.  Clearly the musings of the deranged – I digress.  No denying its bone chillingly cold in many parts Ontario, Quebec, and a large swath of the U.S.  The weather has caused havoc for many in the east, and introduced us to new terminology.

The term “polar vortex” is being used to explain this surprising and brutally cold weather front.  The technical definition aside, I’m fascinated that meteorologists are suggesting that this cold front was surprising.  Interesting, weather fronts come as surprise but we can predict the earth’s temperatures fifty years from now?  Damn, that “polar vortex” sure was a doozy. 

Many in Toronto, including my mom and dad, we’re convinced they were under attack this week because of what sounded like gun fire. Police we’re flooded with calls about this mysterious noise.  Well, chalk up to good old fashioned “cryoseisms”.  Evidently it occurs in extreme cold situations where there’s saturated water, like your rooftop. The ice expands and cracks.  It’s loud and frightening.  It’s kind of like the noise you heard as a kid while walking on a frozen pond.  To be precise it was the noise just before you said “oh, $&@$”.  My poor parents, they woke up to this noise at 3am last week.  They awoke startled and disoriented; for a moment they thought they were at the Eaton Centre.

January 2014 will be remembered for the frost quake.  That’s what they’re calling it, a frost quake.  That’s a new one.  It’s now a term that will be used, at nausea in Ontario, to described really, really cold temperatures. As is typical of the center of the universe, we always come up with term which captures the uniqueness of our experience.  “You think it’s cold where you are?  Well, we had a frost quake”.  There really was no need to create a new term to describe the extreme cold.  My friends in Regina have a perfectly acceptable word for it already, Tuesday.

Until next time,

Cheers.