I don’t want to jinx us or anything, but this doesn’t feel like mid-November in Prince George to me.
For some of my younger readers, this weather is nothing like what we had back in my day. By the middle of November, the temperature was usually down to about minus-40 as a high and there were already seven or eight feet of snow on the ground.
The worst of it was going to school in those days. There were no cold-weather days back then, so after a solid breakfast of hot cereal, orange juice and a couple of pieces of bread, it was out into the snowy whiteness outside the front door.
The wind was usually blowing about 40 miles an hour (ask your parents or grandparents what that works out to, kids), and it was always blowing in your face. Didn’t matter if you were going to school or coming home, the wind was always against you.
I also found out talking to friends after we made it to school they had the same problem. They might be walking east to school while I was walking west, but the wind was against them, blowing snow in a near-blinding torrent of granules into your eyes, your mouth and your nose.
If you left one square inch of skin uncovered before you left home, you could almost guarantee something close to frostbite by the time you completed the long trek to school.
And they were long treks. I went to Quinson Elementary, and we lived almost a block away. It only seemed like three or four miles while we were walking there and back every day.
The one benefit to these ceaseless Arctic conditions was that our PE classes were held indoors. Of course, for someone like me, who was quite small then and very slow (some things have changed, others haven’t), the class being indoors meant a fair bit of dodgeball.
And back then, we didn’t use wimpy little rubber balls for dodgeball. We used medicine balls. That was bad for me on two accounts. When I was trying to throw the ball, it usually took me two or three minutes to lift the ball high enough to throw. When I was trying to defend, one hit from those things usually sent me back about five feet.
So I don’t want to see any of you young whipper-snappers complaining about our weather.
We had it a lot worse in my day.