Winter Ireland

It doesn’t matter how many years you have lived though a Canadian Winter… -40 below, digging out your car after a snowstorm, bundling up in all of the winter layers to go to the shop… you still never get used to the cold and you certainly don’t miss it.

Ireland is not supposed to have a harsh winter, sure the temperature gets low and there’s some frost warnings. At the very worst you get slushy snow that falls from the shy and hardly sticks to the roads but this year, I’m not sure what Ireland did wrong but we’re paying for something.

Some people have been stuck in their homes since Christmas due to the cold weather. We had a couple of wet snowfalls where the temperature was much colder than normal and the snow, and by snow I really mean ice pellets and slush, stuck and overnight it froze so that people are stranded. Commuters abandoned their cars on the side of the motorways and found alternative ways to get home, or simply walked up the steep hill that the car was unable to climb. Dublin Bus left around 100,000 people stranded in the city center when, right at the beginning of rush hour they called the buses off the roads because it was too dangerous.

For us it’s been different, tricky and especially cold. The very best thing I did was on Tuesday I went out and bought an electric mattress cover for the bed. It’s not that we have no heaters in the apartment but the thought of leaving them on for hours running up the electricity bill kinda deters me from heating the place. We have storage heaters and they make the apartment lovely and warm during the day but the heat doesn’t last into the evening and the cat in his fur coat – as much as we love him – doesn’t need a heater! So now, 30 minutes before I head off to bed we switch on the blanket to high and climb into what I can only describe as heaven!

Sleep has now become long, lovely and comfortable and makes getting up in the mornings even more unbearable! I’m looking forward to tomorrow morning when there’s no alarm and the apartment heaters will be on and I can stay in my PJs surrounded by lovely warmth all weekend! Hopefully that will kill the sickness that I’ve been fighting since I left Montreal… the sickness is a whole other blog vent.

Later!