OK. I don’t condone fighting in hockey. But, this is snort-liquid-of-choice – through-the-nose funny:

Rain and wind: still ongoing.

Santa Claus parade: extremely damp and chill-inducing. We didn’t go.

Boil water advisory: still in place.

Ah, winter in Vancouver.

We took Aidan for haircut #2 yesterday afternoon.

In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have done it when he was so tired. Despite my best efforts, he didn’t get a nap yesterday. Not for a lack of trying, though. Also not for a lack of needing. He just wouldn’t go to sleep. Anyway, we went for haircuts around 4. The same barber who cut his hair last time was there, and getting him onto the kiddy bench wasn’t that difficult. The trouble started when the apron was placed over him.

And, by “trouble” I mean crying.

So, we tried a different approach. I sat in the chair, and Aidan sat on my lap. Well, that was sorta ok. Until the clippers turned on. Then the flight or fight instinct kicked in. Fortunately it was mostly the flight instinct, but that meant that it took both Gwen and I to hold him more or less still (well, actually a whole lot less than more) while the barber tried to cut his hair. For the whole experience, Aidan cried, shrieked, and fought to escape. The barber showed remarkable patience.

After trimming what he could, Aidan fled with Gwen while I got my hair cut. Aidan cuddled with Gwen for almost the whole time, but eventually started showing interest in the other people who were there getting their hair cut, and interest in what was being done to them.

Maybe we should look into cutting his hair ourselves. For the sake of the barber and his customers.

Wow, it’s been wet. Vancouver has had, apparently, 237 mm of rain this month. The record rainfall for the month is 351 mm, set in 1983. Note, however, that we still have half a month to go.

So, that’s a lot of rain. And it’s been coming in very un-typical winter storms. It’s not unheard of, but usually the rain comes down in a constant, but reasonably light, drizzle. Not this month. This month, we’ve been having what would be typical Atlantic winter storms. The one yesterday packed quite a punch, stopping the ferries, knocking out power to over 150,000 Lower Mainland residents (in fact, that’s the number that didn’t have power this morning, some 18 hours after the worst of the storm had passed), flooding various areas, knocking down a steel-framed building under construction, and just generally causing a nuisance.

That much rain in a short period of time has kicked up quite the mess on the local mountains too. The three reservoirs (Capilano, Cypress, and Seymour) are over-full and all riled up. So much so that the water supply has high turbidity. Now, in my civil engineering courses, they taught us all about turbidity. Unsurprisingly, I remember very little about it — the “water” speciality never held any of my interest. My friend Audrey, who now is Operations Manger for the City (?) of Sydney, Nova Scotia (now, apparently the Cape Breton Regional Municipality), knows all about it and I’m sure could tell you more than you ever wanted to know. From me, all you’ll get is a link to Wikipedia: turbidity.

So why am I telling you this? Because, in this day and age, this modern world in which we live (sorry, Paul, it’s not in this world in which we live in), in this modern city, we should *not* be under a boil water advisory. That’s right. The GVRD is *suggesting* (it’s not an order yet) that we boil our water before consuming. That we don’t bathe our children, only showers. Tooth brushing in boiled water only. Washing of fruit and vegetables with boiled water only. Fun stuff! It turns out that the turbidity of our water is currently in the 80s (NTU) , when it is usually around 1 NTU. And, you can tell. Or, at least, it’s become quite obvious over the past few hours. The water in the toilet has gone from crystal-clean to incredibly cloudy. Oddly, it’s not as “dirty” as I would expect — it’s not brownish — but still, it’s pretty obviously abnormal.

Hopefully this only lasts a short while. However, we have another major storm expected on Sunday, so it could be a rough month!