By tomorrow afternoon I will no longer be a Montrealer. My transcript doesn’t quite say “graduated” yet, or whatever it is transcripts are supposed to say at this point, but all the appropriate boxes under the “Recommendations” heading say “yes” and faculty approval is pending. It’s as good as done. Never mind the fact that I got my grad school acceptances months ago…

The fact that I’m moving didn’t settle in until I took all the art, posters, and calendars off the walls. While half the floor is two or three feet deep in junk, everything at about eye level is boring blank white. That was the trigger. This doesn’t feel like my home anymore.

The rest of the job has just been rearranging the junk on the floor into more manageable piles. It was funny how simply dumping out a full drawer and rearranging everything would suddenly free up half the space. Everything could be laid out nicely in its place, in roughly a single layer along the bottom no less. “Nice”, I thought, “now I’ll actually be able to find stuff in there”. But then it occurred to me that with all that extra space, I could just cram more stuff in. Which is exactly what I did. So now the drawer is just as full but twice as heavy, and solidly packed so you can’t actually move anything aside to get at something underneath.

I also put all my textbooks into the same box.

Now at the same time this doesn’t feel different from any other May. I’ve never spent the summer in Montreal, so packing up my stuff at the end of the winter semester is nothing new. I wonder if moving to grad school will feel any different from coming back to McGill. A new school, sure, but functionally I don’t know if much will change. More of the part I like, at least, and less of the stuff I don’t. That’s really all I can ask. That’s really all I’m aiming for.

I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning how ridiculously snowy it is in Montreal this year. I wasn’t too convinced that it was really that much snow—we get big snowstorms now and again—but then I remembered that those big snowstorms used to be two or three times a year. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve had at least forty two landmark blizzards in the last two weeks. I was finally convinced that there really has been an inordinate amount of snow when I tried to leave my building this morning:

Not that I mind climbing over snowbanks to get out of my front door. Or anywhere else in this city. To be fair, the tips of snowbanks shouldn’t really count toward how deep the snow is, but it is still fair to say that anywhere with less than 2 or 3 feet could legitimately be called “shallow” right now. And also “rare”.

The shoveled version of my front walk is only mildly better, even if it does call to mind various frightening scenarios.

Yes. Pirates and jellyfish. My paranoid delusions about deep snowy passageways don’t have to be internally consistent.

The weather has been pretty weird around Montreal the last day or so. At least I’m told that it’s weird. The grocery store stopped delivering because of the cold, my morning workout was canceled due to snow, and I keep hearing about weather warnings. The particular strange type of precipitation that’s going on outside right now reminded me about a conversation I had with someone the other day about all the different types of snow. I may not have as many words for it as the Inuit (assuming the rumours are true) but it’s more than one.

• Fluffy: This is the typical, nice, romantic type snow that comes down in snowflakes the size of your fist. It looks very good on television, and from indoors sitting in front of a fireplace.
• Sticky: The stuff snowballs are made from. Fluffy snow is useless for anything other than kicking it around like cotton balls. It’s sticky snow that’s the best to play in. You can grab a handful and find a snowball in your hand, and it makes elaborate Calvin and Hobbes style snowscapes possible.
• Granular: This is the weird stuff I walked through today to get groceries. It was basically hailing out rather than snow, but it had been going on for so long that the snow on the ground had quite a thick layer of it. It was like walking through really coarse sand.
• Invisible: Usually the first few snowfalls of the season are nothing but invisible snow. Or maybe phantom snow would be a better name. You can see it falling, but it doesn’t stick, disappearing the instant it hits the ground. It barely counts as snowing at all.
• Skeletal: Where invisible snow is the first stuff you see, skeletal snow is the last. Snow on the ground never melts uniformly. All sorts of factors come into play, I’m sure, like air pockets and dirt on the surface. The effect is that the snowbanks decay from the inside out in places, making strange tunnels and passage. The formerly smooth surface gives way to a crystalline structure with dusty spires and icy caves.

And, my personal favourite,

• Crusty: I think this is caused by the snow changing to freezing rain. You can a nice thick crust on top of the snow that, if you’re very careful, you can walk on without breaking. Or, if it does break, it makes a big satisfying cracking noise and you fall into the softer stuff beneath. If you pick up a slice of the crust, it’ll usually have fluffy snow stuck to the underside of it. It’s better than breaking the crust of a crème brûlée.

This is sticking to the natural stuff, i.e., not brown, yellow, or the firm compact stuff in the middle of sidewalks. I’m sure there are others as well, and there can definitely be combos. Today there’s about a half inch of black ice on the sidewalks (which really makes it grey ice, I guess), a layer of the soft and fluffy, topped off with the granular stuff from today’s hail. The black ice/fluffy combination is particularly dastardly, since one false step will send you flying and you’ll never see it coming.

[Flip the lights on/off]

Every December for the last few years, there’s been a big snowstorm in Montreal. And each time it snows here there’s a jump in my site stats as everybody searches for “montreal snowstorm” and find this photo album I published after the one in 2005. Every time I feel a little guilty that they’re getting old photos of the wrong storm. They aren’t even very good photos.

This year’s storm was particularly good, though, so I’ve taken some new ones. My favourite part has been that the city is being really slow about removing all the snow. It may not be convenient for cars to have to dig parking spaces for themselves, or to have two lanes reduced to one because of some dominating snow banks, but it sure is nice to look at! And fun to climb through! Though I think the official count was somewhere between 30 and 40 centimetres in the main storm, it’s been snowing on and off for a couple weeks in addition to that, and a combination of plows and wind have made some of the snow banks taller than I am. I love it.

Despite my promises of new snow photos just two paragraphs ago, I’m technically supposed to be studying for an exam and writing an astrophysics paper, so that album will have to be added to the waiting list with the rest from 2007. In the meantime, here’s my favourite picture of the bunch, taken in front of McGill’s music building: Queen Victoria’s New Dress.

You gotta love the respect Montreal drivers have for the rules of the road, like obeying these no-parking signs outside my apartment building.

They were standing up in a row at one point, defending some territory for the city workers due to fix some water pipes and put in a new sidewalk the next morning. So much for that. Apparently there are more important things.

I don’t know how I did it, and anybody who knows me isn’t likely to believe it, but I’ve turned my sleep schedule on its head. Up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning the last few days and to sleep by about 21:00. Class doesn’t even start for another 45 minutes and already I feel like I’ve had a very productive day.

Yesterday I went exploring. Jumped on the first metro of the morning eastward bound and went to the Olympic Basin on Île Notre Dame. I was still underground when the sun rose, but it was a nice view nonetheless.

There were exactly three rowers on the water, arriving just at the same time I did. I sat in the stands and watched them go past until they were out of sight at the other end of this overblown swimming pool.

It somehow seemed much smaller than the course in Coal Harbour that I’m used to. Free of other traffic and turns and scenery and anything interesting whatsoever. Chances were, by the time you hit the 500m mark at the Vancouver Rowing Club, you had navigated past a yatch or two and avoided getting yourself run over by the Huckleberry Finn style paddlewheeler. At the Olympic Basin, when you hit 500m all that that’s happened is that you’ve rowed 500m. I suppose it has its advantages.

This morning at 5:30 I was out the door running up Mont Royal. Or at least I tried. I had big ambitions of running about 10km, my course all laid out, but it turns out running uphill is hard. Big surprise. But run I did, as far as the lookout at the Chalet, where I saw the sun break over the distant hills. Montreal has a much bigger sky than Vancouver. There was no camera on hand this time to catch the sight, though. Maybe tomorrow morning.

It had all the elements of that quintessential bad flight—crying baby across the aisle to my left, woman with tiny bladder getting up every twenty minutes on the right, and crazy man behind me kicking my seat and deciding my armrest was actually his footrest—but it went surprisingly well. In fact the only thing that really annoyed me is that I still didn’t get to see the end of my second movie. If only I hadn’t watched that episode of Corner Gas I had already seen at the beginning of the flight… oh, the ups and downs of the personal entertainment unit.

Waking up in Montreal today I felt a bit like a mother coming home from just dropping off her youngest at the university dorm. In many ways this is an empty city for me now, all my best friends having flown off to something new. Even my apartment feels distant, full of someone else’s stuff from the summer. The soulful flugelhorn singing across the road in the music building isn’t particularly uplifting in this train of thought.

Despite the great times I had in Vancouver—I have, for example, a small teddy bear from our first place finish at the regatta in June sitting on my television set, and a t-shirt in my closet that makes me smile every time I think of it and the memories it represents—by the time I was on the plane it already felt like it never happened. The same way, I guess, that Nagasaki faded away when I landed in North America four years ago, or the way Montreal didn’t exist while I was in Vancouver.

Yet somehow, though these places ceast to exist when I leave, home is always where I’m not. When I’m in New Brunswick for Christmas, when I say “home” I mean Montreal. When in Vancouver, home was New Brunswick. And now, for a while at least, home means Vancouver.

I went for a walk today and the streets of Montreal felt nothing but grey and urban. Not my best colours, but ones I must live with for another eight months. I can deal with that. Just a blip in time until the next plane, until I’m off to whatever city accepts me, and Montreal might be called home again.

I would be tempted to claim that there was not a single cloud in all of Canada yesterday afternoon or evening.

I started, as always, in that little propeller plane at a modest 15 000 feet over the late-winter woods and lakes of New Brunswick. I feel I can say late-winter since, even though we’re well into May at this point, the branches are still bare are some snow and ice still persists on the water’s surface. I didn’t take a picture this time, though.

Flying into Montreal I noticed that among the checkboard farmer fields there was an occasional rectangle of houses. I can imagine the family, after generations of bringing in the harvest, deciding for one reason or another to leave it behind for greener pastures—figurative ones this time—and letting the developers come in with their subdivision.

After a meal of St Hubert’s chicken in the airport I was airborne again, this time for the long haul to Vancouver. Quebec and Ontario continued with standard east coast scenery before giving way to the Prairies, where the checkerboard squares are larger and reach, literally, to the horizon in every direction, only occasionally giving way to a winding river valley. Brown wheat faded to white, blue, and navy, exactly like being in the shuttle watching moonrise, except with a less pronounced curvature and no celestial orbs. Still, it was a nice view.

I guess I must admit that, though I did see a lot of the Rocky Mountains, closer to Vancouver they seemed to be holding back some cloud layer, so I didn’t get to see the city from above. The city knows how to make a first impression regardless—that much was clear as I was walking by the stone walls, native artwork, and waterfalls in the airport. Yes, waterfalls. And today, after a beautifully sunny afternoon just after sunset, I walked from my house to the beach and put my feet in the Pacific ocean. Not bad for my first day at a new job.

A recent post on ni.vu.ni.connu about a recent post on The DEWLiner’s Art Blog about an intersection of Scully Way and Mulder Ave in Ontario reminded me of a similar place here in Montreal.

When I lived in Verdun, my regular bus took me through this intersection. If I still took that bus, I might be tempted to go out and take a picture, but for now I’ll just settle on a screenshot from Google Maps. I know the intersection of Duke and Wellington may not be exactly on target, but it’s a pretty good hit for the famous jazz musician.

It don’t mean a thing
If it ain’t got that swing
Doo-wat doo-wat, doo-wat doo-wat
It don’t mean a thing
All you got to do is sing
Doo-wat doo-wat, doo-wat doo-wat
Doo-wat doo-wat, doo-wat doo-wat