Happy New Year!

Happy New Year and best wishes for 2009, everyone!

Vancouver is thoroughly covered in snow! As a former resident of Toronto, I get plenty of entertainment watching the locals become completely stumped by pieces of frozen water. Not that the Torontonians deal with it much better -- counting down the days until winter ends is no way to consider yourself adapted to the climate -- but at least they've invented the plough by now, which sets them approximately 9000 years ahead of Vancouver.

It's quite beautiful and nearly surreal, the marriage of the mountaneous and maritime great Northwest with the undeniable purity and beauty of proper (snowy) winter. If only we could get some frost here; say, -15 or -20. That'd be nice. Mwahaha.

I hope to get some pictures tomorrow, to share the enjoyment. If it doesn't all turn to slush by then -- the inevitable and fast-approaching fate of Vancouver snow. It makes me quite sad... for often the snow has barely lived a day before it must turn to mush, and end its ephemeral existence so ungracefully. Sometimes the snow is born from the skies an ungraceful slush, and clings to your every footstep, begging to be accepted as the real thing. But you trudge on through the muck, stepping on the pleading slushiness of the bastard child of rain and snow -- a mere hybrid, not to be accepted as one or the other. And then you get wet. Thus killing the whole poetic-ish mood of the scene, as I have here.

I had some plans for 2009 blogging -- namely the celebration of evolution and biodiveristy by going through each of the phyla on the Keeling et al. 2005 tree. That's rather ambitious, I must admit; and I'm rather lazy and undisciplined. So we'll see how that goes. Hopefully not as bad as trekking along Vancouver's sidewalks these days. Seriously...