Week 35: There is really a lot of snow

This week there was a crazy blizzard!! I thought that I knew blizzards, but boy, Hokkaido really puts Ottawa to shame. It blizzarded for about 8 hours straight, with much of that time being total whiteout conditions. I ran to another building to turn on a machine, and in the 2 minutes that I was indoors, my footprints in the snow were completely erased (which was a good thing, because they were embarassing... due to the whiteout, I wandered into a snowbank and almost fell over, so I'm sure that my path made it look like I was drunk). The snow was so heavy that three people slept in the lab overnight! We also got more snow on most of the days that followed; in this week alone we have easily gotten 50 cm, and maybe as much as a metre.

I made a comment to my friend a little while ago that our backyard would probably be a good place to really see how much snow had accumulated, because it's a pretty narrow strip of land between our long building and a strip of woods (and so the snow there can't get blown around too much). She sadi that that would be true if they didn't plow it. I thought she was joking, because why would they plow a backyard? But then they plowed the backyard. RIP snowman that my friend's kid built! So since the plow went by, there is a big buildup of snow outside my window (from the sides of the plow, as well as from the stuff that is always sliding off of the roof), so this isn't REALLY an accurate estimate, but in any case, this is what I saw when I looked out my window on Saturday morning.

And this is what happened when I stepped outside:

This is a VERY NORMAL amount of unforecasted overnight snow!

And this is what the sidewalk on the way to the grocery store looks like:

That's a pretty narrow alley! Later on there was no path at all.

Anyway, in other exciting news, I finally broke down and bought a new computer!! My laptop has been giving me grief of varying sorts pretty much since the day I bought it (I think it was a bit of a Boxing Day lemon). I have been hemming and hawing for a long time, and I nearly bought a new computer before I came to Japan, but today my computer did its effing annoying habit of forgetting that it has a network card, and that was really just the last straw for me.

Buying a computer without being able to communicate very well with the store person was, ironically, much an easier and less patronizing experience than buying a computer in Canada. I usually HATE buying things like that, because I hate the upsell that the salespeople are being forced to give you, and I hate the way that they talk down to you and try to make you consider dumb alternatives. So it was kind of nice for him to pretty much just take me at my word when I said that I knew what I wanted, and I was really lucky that allegedly I got the last one of the exact model that I had been thinking of all along!

It's so purple!

On Sunday I built some snow cats with my neighbours! I only managed to take a picture of the first one because I was frozen solid by the time we finished the second one. I'm sure they will only survive for a day or two before they are bulldozed, but it was fun to play in the snow!

Hm, my phone makes the snow look an awful lot more blue than it really is...