Winter Storms

Wintertime in Kanazawa is full of sleet, slush, freezing rain, and this winter, snow. There's also a lot of wind. Half of the time an umbrella during a sleet storm is more hassle than help, especially when the wind decides to change direction and invert your umbrella halfway down the street. There are some pretty cool thunderstorms with snow and sleet, though it's fairly unnerving to walk to work in a snowy thunderstorm.


Our apartment building is quite old. We can tell when large trucks go by from the shaking of the walls, and can only tell the difference between trucks and earthquakes by the length of time of the shaking. The winter storms, with their howling winds, also cause our building to shake. Even the inner doors tend to rattle when the wind is blowing.


In addition to being woken up by shrieking winds and rattling doors, there has been quite a bit of snow buildup this winter. When the snow falls off of the roof on the back of the building, it hits our porch first on its way down, which also causes a loud, abrupt, and undesired awakening when it happens in the middle of the night. Whether it was the snow, the wind, or some other phenomenon, we awoke one morning to discover most of our pictures shifted in their frames by the shaking of the building.  Nothing a little tape wouldn't cure, but we felt it was a suitable demonstration of the magnitude of shaking our apartment sometimes does.

Now we've taped all of the pictures in the frames. I find it interesting that neither of the two frames of my friends and family were shifted, but they may have been taped down originally. At least the frames themselves have proven to be stable on the walls!