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Friday, January 22, 2016

Balmy.

Canadians have a stereotype/urban legend about Americans.  The idea is that large numbers of Americans think Canada is covered with snow and ice 365 days a year, that it's permanently winter up here.  I use the term urban legend because people will tell you someone they know encountered or saw Americans coming into Canada in the middle of July, expecting to engage in winter sports.  One I heard was someone seeing an American car with downhill skies on the roof.

In reality winter weather isn't even the same across Canada.  It varies considerably on where you live.  If you visit Vancouver in January you won't see lots of ice and snow unless they had bad weather come through.  Daytime temperatures are usually around freezing or higher.  Winnipeg on the other hand is well known for its cold winters, with stories about the horrible winds swirling around its major downtown intersection Portage and Main.

And of course the weather varies from day to day.  Last Friday the daytime low in Saskatoon was -28 degrees Celsius, the daytime high -17.  And that led into a weekend where the daytime high didn't break -24.  Today's predicted high?  0, the freezing point.  A wonderful temperature for the late part of January, when the temperatures are often their coldest of the winter.  AS I write this the temperature is -7, which would make a nice daytime high itself. 

A typical Saskatoon summer day might reach 30 degrees Celsius.  Which is 86 degrees Fahrenheit, American readers.  So the only skies you should be bringing are water skies.

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