Archive for December, 2003
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Things they don’t tell you about Canada, Part one: Chinooks
Friday, December 19th, 2003
For those of you who’ve never heard of a chinook (shi-nook), don’t worry, it’s not a big white abominable beast that waits for you, camouflaged in the snow, until it can pounce on you and make you into human gumbo…
It’s worse.
OH, it sound harmless enough: a warm weather pattern that blows over the mountains, bringing wonderful warm air to the fair town of Cochrane, melting the snow, making this beautiful arch in the clouds, bringing with it the expectation of sunnier days, not so gloomy with harsh winds and snow.
In reality, though, it’s a conniving, tricky, scornful plot of nature to kill me and take the TV I got for Christmas.
I’d heard the stories. I knew that sudden shifts in barometric pressure could “bother” people. I knew that people had been “a little sick,” and had experienced “headaches” before. And I’d never had a migraine before, so it sounded harmless enough.
That is, until one descended upon Cochrane.
I woke up innocently enough. My head was beginning to pound a little, so I figured I’d slept funny or it was just more of the extremely dry air making me sick. After I’d stood up and got around, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a debilitating throbbing (throbbing as in “jackhammer”) in my head and immediately swooned with nausea. I thought I’d lose last night’s dinner and then try to crack my head open and lose that, too.
It was absolutely awful.
I took Tylenol (TM! TM! I don’t want to get fined!!!) to try and stop the headache, but instead of actually repairing me, all it did was sit there as a chemical in my body, serving as an obstacle to putting other, working chemicals in my body.
As soon as the regulatory four hours were up, though, I popped some Ibuprofen and lay back down, praying someone would run me over with a tractor. Nothing seemed to help, really, so I just lay there, groaning aloud, hoping to hear a loud tractor engine approaching my head.
I made it through it, though, which you’ve probably ascertained as you’ve read this post. It weren’t a picnic, though, as they say in Lyons, Georgia.
I was amazed at the knowing nods and affirmations the next day. I told people about my horrific experience and they said, “See, I told ya!”
“No, NO!” I said. “You told me I might get a little sick. You told me I would experience headaches. You didn’t tell me the chinook would place me in the third floor of the Torture Chamber of Doom!!!”
I’m wondering if I should just start realizing that Canadians horribly understate what they mean. This really doesn’t give me comfort, especially since they’ve said winter here can be “brutal.”
What if they really mean winter is somehow radioactive here, and may or may not kill you?
They certainly didn’t put that in the brochure.
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