For New Years I insisted that my family attend the city celebrations in Ottawa, despite the temperature hovering somewhere between "March of the Penguins" winter and death by frostbite. I am pretty sure Finger Eleven was wishing they had taken the New Year's gig in Winnipeg or Whitehorse, or somewhere warmer.

This morning Jay and I went out to do some shopping and made it no more than a single downtown block before our faces started peeling off, and before we had gotten two blocks one of us may have started crying ice cubes. It brought back a flood of childhood memories, standing outside in mid-Decembet, in my Air Cadet trench coat and steel-tipped army boots, waiting for the bus and believing that loss of sensation in my upper thighs and the ability to break off frozen pieces of my fingers and ears was a completely normal part of growing up in Canada.

And then I moved to B.C. Now I believe that an umbrella is a perfectly acceptable reaction to snow.