Bad Choice...

Thank God for BlackBerrys, as they allow you to capture some strange sights in our city. Like in this photo I took driving home from school today. It may seem straight forward, some cars and a billboard, but what upset me was the billboard.

The billboard on Main and Lansdowne is impossibly hard to read. The first problem is it is "reverse typeface" which is the only option for a black billboard. But the font chosen is so thin it disappears into the black background. The second problem is the type is near-impossible to read, in and of itself. The type could be described as "stick font" or "stick lighta" which is the name of the example below.

Looking at the example alphabet above, you can see the problem wiht choosing such an outlandish font, and pairing it with a black background. There is simply no easy way to decipher what it says. After about the third time being stopped by the billboard in quesiton, waiting for the stoplight to turn green, I figured out what it actually said.
"CLOSE ENCOUNTER, THE NEXT 500 YEARS"
It's an ad for an indigenous art exhibit held at the.... hmm didn't catch where, as the car in front of me was pulling away. But this only emphasizes my point that the designer of the billboard really wasted those advertising dollars if I didn't catch what it was for until the third time around.

All that snow...I've never seen so many people outside since summer!

I need a truck! But then I think of how it cost me 50 bucks to fill up my small car, and I am glad that's all. But still! I got to school fine. Highway number 9 had two nice ruts for me to follow cautiously to the city. I managed to park ok. Then about noon I went to my car to get some gym clothes and the snow was coming down like crazy. I made it there and back, with a little difficulty, and was surprised to find that so much snow had fallen my purse was filled with snow! I've never had that happen before.
Then, I was leaving the cramped parking lot downtown when my car wouldn't move. It was stuck! So I had to do some maneuvering and finally got it out. Then I went to my Granny's and the street wasn't plowed and got stuck trying to park on the street because i didn't dare try to go in her unplowed driveway. An observation though, was the amount of people I saw outside! It was like every second house there was a male furiously shoveling the snow out of the driveway. I didn't see any accidents, thank God for that.

All this snow is great for the snowmobilers and snowboarders, but it's bad for those of us that live on water. We have a creek in our backyard and in 2009 it was so high it looked like a river. It drops about 25 feet down and the water was all the way up to the grass level with teh house-no flooding though. But if it's any worse this year, I'll be sandbagging  like crazy! But hopefully all the snow won't melt at once and we'll be ok.

My biggest fear

So for lack of a better topic I will resort to a pre-thought up one I jotted down on a list not to long ago. My biggest fear is climbing into bed and something is in my bed or under the covers. So every night before I go to bed I make sure to turn on my bedside lamp and then go turn the overhead light off. That way when I go to climb into bed I know no one or nothing is in it! My puppy is often sleeping on my bed, but visibly and not hiding. Here he is tucked in.

My dog has scared me occasionally when I go into my dark room quickly to grab something off my bed and my hands hit a warm furry body. It's quite terrifying. Anyways if you weren't scared of it before, I hope you're not afraid of it now!

Give me a quad over a snowmobile anyday.

I like to quad. I live in the sprawling RM of St Andrews with a large farmer's field complete with rolling hills running down to a creek, right behind my house. I enjoy taking walks and occasionally jumping on an atv for a further excursion. So being conditioned on a quad and having not been on a snowmobile for years, the machines quite frankly scare the crap outta me.

I'm bringing this up after a man was out walking in Transcona, when he was struck by a snowmobile. He later died from his injuries. You can read about it here. When I heard about this I remembered just last Saturday another one on highway 317, on the way to Lac du Bonnet, coincidentally where I was that Saturday. So it made me think about the dangers of those fast-paced machines, and my fear of them.

I suppose a quad can do as much damage to the human body as a snowmobile, yet the few crashes I've been in haven't garnered much more than a few bruises. Don't get me wrong, I think snowmobile's are great, you can use them to go over lengths of snowcovered highway to reach stranded motorists. Or drive down long stretches on northern Manitoba to a neighbor's. Or even some relaxed trailblazin' on a Sunday afternoon. Tons of my friends a snowmobile fanatics. They peer excitedly out the window at the snowfall. You can see the wheels turning as they devise a plan to make it out to some of the trails north of Winnipeg.

But when it comes to myself ever owning one- I doubt it will ever come to that. I think for my own personal recreation I'll stick with the quad.  It's less speedy, coming in at a max speed around 80-90 km ( still extremely fast) where as snowmobiles can reach 150km speeds. Safe Kids Canada says that each year snowmobiles cause 200 deaths and 14,000 injuries in North America. I couldn't locate similar stats on ATV's.

It's all-terrain means yes, you can use it in snow as well as the warm muddy summers of Manitoba. And mastering the all-terrain-vehicles in all kinds of terrain is half the fun. And more bang for your buck, wouldn't you say?

Needless to say, I won't be investing my hardearned cash on a snowmobile this winter, or ever for that matter. But that's just me.