Rissa Renae

Author of Teen Paranormal Fiction

Category: Winter

Isolation – Week 4 – Gone to the Birds

April 15, 2020 /

I’m sure you’ve heard the adage, April showers bring May flowers. This year, however, April has been snowy and bitterly cold. We should be seeing temps in the high single digits (that’s high 40’s for my fellow Americans), but we’ve had temperatures fall as low as -14C (that’s about 7 Fahrenheit). There have been no April showers, just big dumps of snow.

When the sun did manage to peak out, the puppers and I made sure we got out for walkies. And it appears the neighbourhood birds were just as eager to get out as we were.

Chickadees are the most common bird in my area. Their chattering calls echo from the forests. How-ever-in-the-world such a tiny bird can make so much noise is beyond me.

And the downy woodpeckers are out looking for bugs. Good luck, little guy. It’s too cold for many bugs.

I also spotted this sparrow building a nest in a neighbour’s trusses.

These past few weeks have been weird. There have been several nights where I’ve had to wake up and check my phone to see what day it was, or what day tomorrow would be. My ‘weekdays’ mean my alarm went off and I got up, assuming it was a work day. What day it was exactly, sometimes I didn’t know. I just got up and did whatever!

The only good thing about working from home is an odd thing probably unique to me. I suffer from secondary insomnia as a by-product of my anxiety. Those days when I’m tossing and turning at 3 AM can now be spent on the couch playing repetitive games until I get tired again, and I don’t have to worry about the 6 AM hangover. But now that we’re going past a month in isolation, I’d much rather have the no-sleep-hangover and go to work tired if I can leave my freaking house!

The cabin fever is real, yo! I’ve always thought I was a homebody. That was, until I had no choice. Now I’m pacing in front of the window, wandering back and forth through the house, organizing my sock drawer . . . I’m going insane.

Thankfully Mother Nature took pity on us poor folk and gave us one . . . count them ONE . . . day of seasonal temperatures. Beautiful clear skies and t-shirt weather drew us out of our homes for a day. We shielded our eyes from that giant ball of nuclear explosions in the sky and waded through streets that turned to rivers. All signs pointed to spring once again returning . . .

Until frickin’ Mother Nature dropped half a foot of snow on us the next day! I swear, there’s a conspiracy going on around here. “Let’s see how cray-cray the peeps go if we tease them with “normal” weather, but then BOOM! go full tyrant on them!.

Life is not normal, and neither is the weather in these times. End of days, indeed.

Hopefully next week will be better. Fingers crossed!

– Rissa

Caught Talkin’ Smack

April 28, 2019 /

Well, call it Murphy’s Law or Mother Nature just being unreasonable. No more than 24 hours after I issued my glowing report on the first signs of spring, the weather gods decided we needed a blizzard to round things out.

Snapped this pic of the blizzard warning on TV, courtesy Global News Calgary.

Ya know, when you’re watching the news and the meteorologist starts throwing words around like ‘winter storm warning’ and ‘blizzard warning’, then you look out the window and there’s not a cloud in the big blue sky, you sit back and think, “Wow, the weather woman had a bit too much coffee this morning”, then go about your day. (Wow, that was a run-on sentence to beat all run-on sentences!). Until that chance glance outside and you see . . .

Woah, what the heck? Because yesterday it was like . . .

As the day wore on, the snow came heavier and heavier. But still, we were determined to go out for dinner. Although we were snow-blasted just running from the front door to the car, we pressed on. And although we couldn’t see more than a block down the road, we pressed on. It wasn’t until we hit the highway and realized visibility sucked that we decided to turn around, head back, and make dinner ourselves for a night of Netflix and chill.

All went well with dinner. We queued up a show and sat down to watch. Soon, the lights started to flicker. And then all went black. The power had gone out. Lucky for us it wasn’t a long outage. We used the time to shovel snow from the gazebo.

Blowing snow left quite a mess underneath the gazebo.

After a night curled in the heated blanket, I awoke to this . . .

My baby’s breath was just starting to sprout, too.

Yup. Got the message, Mother Nature. Watch my mouth. Noted.

From the back deck, I spotted some odd patterns in the snow. On further inspection, I’m guessing this was a falcon or an owl hunting the voles living under my concrete patio. Looks like he got one too!

A bird of prey mark in the snow . . . or an alien facehugger lives under my porch.

Despite the copious amounts of snow, morning walkies were still lovely. With the pond still thawed and the untouched snow, the morning felt magical. The plentiful sunshine sure didn’t hurt.

Mother Nature, I can’t stay mad at you when you give me views like this!

And Mochi sure loved the snow too.

Super Mochi dashes to the rescue of a bacon treat.

Our only saving grace is that the snow will be melted in two days, and no, that’s not a challenge, Mother Nature!

Now, it’s time for a nice warm mug of matcha while my boots dry out.

. . . and to be cheeky, I brewed my matcha in a Santa mug.

-Rissa

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

February 13, 2018 /

I love this time of the year. It’s wonderful, it’s magical.

Nope, it’s not Christmas (although it still looks like it outside).

And it’s not back to school either. It’s not even Halloween (my favourite holiday).

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know what time of the year it is. It’s Roll Up the Rim to Win time!

Every year, the arrival of spring is heralded, not by warmer temperatures or longer days, but by Tim Horton’s yearly coffee contest. It’s a uniquely Canadian lottery. Up for grabs every spring are millions of dollars worth of prizes from free coffee and donuts, all the way up to cars and plasma televisions.

Timmies!

Our prairie prognosticator, Balzac Billy and his shadow aren’t our main predictor’s of spring. Oh no.  The only way you know spring is truly around the corner is when the bright red cups come out.

February is typically our coldest and snowiest month of the year here in the foothills. And this year has been brutal. We received two separate dumps of over a foot of snow this month, and the temperature has been hovering between -10 and -20 C, which makes for a treacherous drive in to work. I’ve practically lived in my snow pants these last few weeks as I need them to keep warm on the walk to work. But spring is on the way. At least that’s what my coffee cup tells me.

Two feet of snow and a single rutted lane

I’m eagerly awaiting the signs of winter being over so I can start my seeds indoor. This year, I want to try my hand at cucumber and peppers. The deer and jackrabits around these parts come in mobs, so instead of building a garden at ground level, I’m going to test drive a small porch garden and see how that works. I just have to wait for the porch to thaw and the signs to appear.

Someone left a cake on my porch table

What are ‘the signs’, you ask? I think here in the foothill’s they’re unique to the region.

1. Fire in the sky.

During winter, the sunsets are pastels and subdued due to more ice crystals in the atmosphere. In the springtime, we receive an abundance of chinooks–warm winds that create arcs of clouds that turn brilliant and fiery at sunset.

Pastels in winter, fiery skies in spring

2. The jackrabbits turn brown before the snows melt.

These little buggers are everywhere, but oddly I don’t have any pictures of them. Jackrabbits are one of the three banes of every foothills gardener, the other two being ground squirrels and white-tailed deer (and the occasional moose).

The neighbourhood meese

3. Frost

I know it sounds weird: frost means spring? Here on the leeward side of the Rocky Mountains, our air is bone dry in the winter. It’s not until the temperature warms up enough to bring melt water into the atmosphere that we’ll get frost. We may have warm nights and warmer days, but the frost won’t come until humidity reaches the magic number. The magic number means spring.

So I’m keeping an eye out for my signs of spring. Late February and early March are typically when we start to see them. Until then, I’m cuddling up with my double-double and keeping the luck warm. Maybe I’ll win a TV this year. I’ll be happy with a free coffee, though.

That’s what makes this time of year so much fun!

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