Ice storm then deep freeze recap

Well in December in Orangeville, Ontario Canada we have had pretty much everything mother nature could throw at you in one winter. This all came in one month.
We started with an ice storm that cause power outages all over. Some people enjoyed Christmas without power (that is sarcasm by the way). For some it lasted for 11 days.
This ice storm has caused many trees to break causing lots of damage. The cleanup will not be finished until the summer.

Then the temperature dropped to -30c. This was on and off but even I said it was cold and was doubling up on my clothing.

In among all this we also had a fair amount of snow. It is the snow we are going to talk about.

When it snows it just doesn't go away it has to go somewhere. So we have all sorts of heavy equipment to push it around. So roads and parking lots have to be cleared. We can't truck it away so we just pile it up somewhere. In a parking lot they make a huge mound as far away from the shops as possible.

Below is the pile in Walmart.

This is one of the piles in the parking lot. There are 3 this is the 2nd biggest. 

This is our car, covered in salt residue.

You can see it is higher than a 5 foot person.

We went to the movies and this is what was waiting for me. It took 10 minutes to clean the car off. Most people just clean the windows and let the rest blow all over the traffic. 

A shot down the street. They will not clean this street, it is a low priority main roads come first. It is a really beautiful site until the sand trucks come back out and make it all sloppy.

More Orangeville (Canada) winter or Canada=SLOP

OK if you have ever lived in Canada save yourself now and just go do something more constructive because these are pictures of ... WINTER.

But if you are from Darwin NT Australia and you keep telling me ... "Oh I'd love to see snow and experience winter", this post is for YOU.

Actually in Orangeville we are lucky because we do get quite a bit of snow and it's sticks around. But road maintenance has to happen and that is what ruins snow. They put down a combination of snow and gravel/dirt to give us some grip on the roads.

This is just a small side street. You can see the gravel/dirt mix that they have put on the road. Hence Canada=SLOP. This stuff is ugly.

Sizing up a bit of chunked icy snow

We have liftoff and soon to be smash.

That snow is got to go somewhere and when the street is a dead end they just make a pile and wait for it to melt away. This one will probably last till May and be a lot bigger. It would be too costly to put the snow in dump trucks and truck them away to a bare field. Not to mention that all that snow has a ton of salt in it which would kill the vegetation.

All that salt and dirt accumulates in the back of your tires. Hence the SLOP. This is why cars rust out so fast here.

This Santa was way bigger than the house

Snow plow, this guy is plowing and dumping the gravel/sand mix

Enough of snow lets go to the greatest store in the world, and it's not IKEA, it's Costco. We are in line for a Hotdog. It's now $1.50 it used to be $1.99 2 years ago.

Pizza $1.99, hotdog with drink $1.50 then add %13 tax. Pretty cheap meal. Oh and the drink is endless. The only bad thing is that they switched from Coke to Pepsi ... BOOOOO

This post is for my Darwin friends

Well everyone in Australia keeps saying that they'd love to experience snow. Well we are in Canada so I'm going to give you my experience with snow and you don't have to be cold or have to shovel it.

We've been in Orangeville 1 1/2 hours drive north of Toronto Ontario, this area is consider just on the southern cusp of the snow belt.

Since we've been here there has been no sun. Today it snowed a little we had to go into the city we used to live in called Brampton. It's 30 min drive at 80km an hour. Here is a few pics from our journey and from yesterdays days outing.

The three pictures below are yesterdays outing.

Canadians are a tough bunch. This store is called Canadian Tire, similar to Bunnings. They eat their hotdogs out in the freezing cold.

This is infront of a grocery store about the same as Coles or Woolies. We are full on Christmas here. When I see how much consumerism is going on here I am amazed.

Yup that's about less than $1.40 a kg for bananas. I don't even know where Guatemala is.

The pictures below are from today outing.

The snow looks really nice on the trees. Here they wrap up some of the trees in burlap cloth so that if they get lots of snow on them it doesn't break the tree.

In some cities you have to clean the snow off of the sidewalk. Here the council cleans it for you with a machine.

This is the driveway covered in snow. 

They clean the main streets from snow but since it is only a few cm they will leave the snow on the street. They only clean the snow if it's a large amount. It could take many days before they clean the side streets.

Driving behind dump trucks that are spraying all the salty water that the snow has become all over our car. Cars rust out very fast here because of the salt put on the roads. We also have a special fluid we put in the windshield reservoir so the water doesn't freeze. It's like a alcohol that's good to -30c 

All that lovely snow turns to slush ... yuck.

This is rock salt that is spread so people won't slip.

Being next to the USA gives Canada great buying power and fruits and veg are very cheap.

Yup we even import Kiwi fruit from 1/2 way around the world

Some people don't clean their cars off. This can be dangerous as the snow will fly off and hit peoples cars driving behind them.

This is where they store the salt. That truck is a snow plow. It is used to clean up the snow around the shopping mall. They dump the salt all over the parking lot in the mall.

This is our bank. It is even open on Sunday. 

The salt is coating the car already. When it is thick I will write something in it and show everyone.

L standing in the snow. It's not too deep yet.

It's 4pm and this is the snow from the front of the house.

The Great Australain Microwave Popcorn Challenge

L lately has taken to eating popcorn while we watch TV and every time I make a bag she claims that on a different night the popcorn was better. As there are only 3 brands that we can purchase at the grocery stores I challenged her to a blind taste test.

Our other reason for creating this challenge is to determine if the Mini Poppin Microwave Popcorn is worth the extra money and the less quantity simply because it's a better tasting product.

The Challengers

• Woolworths Select Microwave Popcorn Butter Flavored 40g bag
• Coles Microwave Popcorn Butter Flavored 40g bag (link is to 200g size)
• Mini Poppin Microwave Popcorn 25g (link to Poppin's funky website)

The Challengers

These products are the smaller cousins of the large bags of popcorn that each brand sells. The Coles and Woolworths are 15g larger that the Popping brand and actually cost less per box even though each individual package has more grams than the Poppin brand. Each box comes with 5 packages of popcorn.

How we tested 
Since we only had 1 microwave oven I popped the bags in the microwave in following order:

• Woolworths 1min 40sec
• Coles 1min 40sec
• Poppin 1min 20sec

After the bag was removed from the microwave I left it unopened on the counter until all bags were popped. The times that we used are from our experience popping these different brands/bags of popcorn. These times minimise the number of unpopped kernels left in the bag.

After popping all of the bags, some popcorn was poured into a coloured bowl. The identity of each bowls brand was only known our corn popper, me. The judge L, was not aware of what brand was in what bowl.

Our Judge.
As you can see we don't just eat Popcorn. On the table is watermelon, mango, banana and rock melon (cantaloupe).

The results
It was noted during the taste test that the reddish bowl, the Woolworths brand, seemed a little soggier than the Coles and Poppins brand. This may be due to the fact that we left the popcorn in the bag until all the bags had been popped and since the Woolworths brand was first popped it could have allowed for more condensation to build up in the bag.

L rated the Coles and Poppins brand a tie for first and Woolworth's brand second. But L said that in reality the difference was so slight that any brand could be as good as the other, hence a 3 way tie.

So what can we take away from this?  

• Open the bag immediately after popping to reduce condensation build-up so that the popcorn doesn't get soggy. 
• The Poppin brand isn't any better than Coles or Woolworths and is may not be worth the extra price. 
• 25g is really a piddly small amount of popcorn but 40g is a nice size for a small snack when sharing between 2 people. 

Our Recommendation
Picking Coles or Woolworths brand is a wise choice with regards to taste and money savings. Which brand you choose really depends on where you do your weekly shopping.

We've done lots in the Dry

The dry is a time when it doesn't rain. When I mean doesn't rain it DOES NOT RAIN for 5 months.

So needless to say in Darwin that's when everything happens. Darwin is the Florida of Australia. It's hard to think that Australia has cold parts but it does. Because of that many people come north to escape the cold and to be tourists.

Only now it is evident that tourism has died off in a big way.

Looking cool on the main strip (Mitchell St.) in the CBD of Darwin.

Down and staying down, well I'm married so what do you expect. Oh and mince is on special this week.

Here's L doing her Vanna impersonation showing her sand dollars. I think we have a couple of thousand dollars worth laying around the house. 

I have no idea what this is. It is a camera malfunction but L took and it looks cool so we're sharing it.

The dry has lots of fires. Some set by the government (controlled burn), some spontaneous, some set by bad people

I keep saying the things we have to do for a great sunset.

As you can see it's mostly the dry brush that burns the trees always survive.

I had a 30cents per litre petrol/gas coupon. So I saved $12+ dollars on $70. I was pretty happy.

I was complaining to a Vietnamese friend who runs a stall at the vegetable market that there is no good Vietnamese spring rolls in Darwin. She said her mother makes good ones and offered us some meat. So 3kgs of meat they gave us. Will filled the freezer and made up a big batch.

For fun we'll drive 45 min to see the bird show at the territory wildlife park. On that trip we also picked up a few native freshwater fish from a local Dam. 

We staked out a place on the beach. Of course there was no one around for quite a distance.

Checked out L's friends business Jamaican Delight.

Always trying to avoid the sun. This is a trip to the poor man's Coles (grocery store). It's not in a poor area it's just no one goes there.

Went to a friends wedding on the foreshore of the ocean. It was a nice wedding.

After the wedding we had soup at our favourite Chinese soup place in the Smith St. Mall in down-town Darwin.

The after that we went to Government House this is where the Territories representative to the Queen lives. It only opens once a year.

This was our turtle that we got to watch at the turtle release. Ours came in 2nd last. She made it to the ocean with a little bit of ranger help.

You can see how small she was. A footstep in the sand was a challenge for this little one to navigate.

Going towards the water.