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This morning I actually had an idea about what to write, but just now as I pulled my laptop out I suddenly realized I had no idea of what I was going to write. Se let me do a little bit of recent events.

“Recent” being early this morning. It's snowing. And in pretty large quantities. The snow is falling thickly and heavily, wind is blowing it around, etc. This morning I brushed off my grandmother's car; I was practically shoveling it off the front of the car. And by the end of it I already was pretty well covered with snow. There is more snow than the forecast called for that's for sure.

Most, if not all, of my readers know about the snowstorm Connecticut got back in October. Granted, this isn't the same volume of snow but If I may brag about my city Montreal knows how to handle snow. Had we gotten the thirty centimetres or however much they ended up with we probably could have handled it. Why? Because we've (I use the term “we” here loosely) have had worse, and wound up in a similar situation. I am, of course, talking about the Ice Storm of 1998. There was so much snow, wind, and cold that the power lines across the province got covered in snow and ice, providing far more weight than they were ever designed to carry, and not only resulted in breakages but even some of the towers collapsed with all the snow and ice. The entire province, so far as I remember, was crippled.

ince then Montreal has gotten much, much better. They are one of the best cities when it comes to dealing with a large snowfall. Up until last night we had gotten about twenty minutes of light snowfall all year (speaking from a scholastic point of view). The kind of snow you see falling but melts before hitting the ground. Despite that, this morning, at 6:45 all the major roads in our area had already been ploughed, salted, and cleared. This is not even five hours after the snow started falling. If Montreal ever gets shut down because of a snowstorm you know it's bad.

What's my point in saying all this? Originally there was none other than to say it, but now I've realized there's a moral here. Mistakes and bad things happen. (Obviously!). But those events are a complete waste for everyone involved if they don't take what happened, analyzed what happened, and figure out how to use this information to prevent it from happening again and looking for clues to predict similar happenings and taking steps to prevent those. This is basically the engineering profession.

Well this concludes a rambling, off-topic and random section. I have no idea what or why I just wrote what I wrote. Hopefully I can get my thoughts together for tomorrow.

Also I regret wearing my running shoes....