Abominable?

Abominable is one of those words, like dessicated, that means nothing like it should, its semantic meaning having been overwhelmed and nicely subdued by its associations. According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu abominable is supposed to mean "unequivocally detestable" (cf. abomination) just as dessicated should denote dried—but for most of us, especially those parents subjected to the nth replay of Monsters Inc, abominable only calls to mind an oversized—do they come undersized?!—and very amiable, irrepressibly cheerful yeti, while dessicated simply means chopped (as in coconut). In that associative sense then, the past 72 hours have indeed been abominable, for it has snowed continually, returning us to the depths of winter that I thought—and Ayumi profoundly hoped—we had finally seen the back of, and mostly it's been fun, as these pictures show. Rokko winter, it seems, is like Canadian winter: thrilling at first, then an alternating mixture of exhilaration and wind-chill, then...enough already! (I'm still at phase two, but for Ayumi, who was hoping to go out for a Valentines' Night meal, instead of hunkering down beside the bedroom radiator, it's very definitely phase three.)

In fact, we were very lucky to get home at all tonight. Both mountain roads were closed, and only by driving around the barrier whose kanji I couldn't read (but whose meaning was clear enough), and with a good angel looking over our shoulder, were we able to drive the 4km up the Ura-Rokko back road through deepening snow and increasingly slick car tracks, to our intersection. We passed only one other car, and it was going down; if we had stopped, no-one might have come for quite a while, and there's no cellular service at that point in the mountain to ring for assistance. However, we wouldn't even have made it to the start of that mountain road without the snow chains that I put on on Friday morning with much strain and effort (and mostly because I didn't want Ayumi to have paid for something we didn't end up using at least once). But today, that hour of sweat, chilled knees, and swearing at the indecipherable instruction sheet paid off handsomely. The moral is that winter is great, if you're prepared for it, and hellish otherwise—abominable, in fact: three of the reasons that I'm still smiling are my sheepskin coat, a proper snow shovel, and a cheap pair of insulated slush boots, the latter the best that Canadian Tire [sic!] had to offer 10 years ago.

For all that, it would have been nice to go out this evening: Yumi, who enjoyed (endured?) the rally drive up the mountain, was to have babysat and put the kids to bed for us while we enjoyed a couple of more urbane hours to ourselves. But we'll have to take a rain-check (snow-check), I guess. Roll on Spring!

[I'll find a suitable piece of music shortly...Got it!

(Even though I used to mock this New Age stuff dreadfully, it has something, and the video is apposite, reminding me of the winter months spent in Ottawa when Sean was around just a bit older than Justin is now: see Expatriotism)]

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