Like a hurt lost and blinded fool; Oh, no I said too much

I've discovered something profound about Winnipeg winters and my general dissatisfaction with them: it's not the cold. All right, that's not entirely true. It's partly the cold. But more than cold, it's the overwhelming grayness of the city at this time that makes winter seem so oppressive and bleak. The cold is bad, make no mistake, but the lack of colour and light are so much worse.

Today was a perfect example of this. The temperature was fine (minus 4 by mid afternoon), but the lack of sunlight combined with the dirty snow in the city seemed to have sucked all the colour, all the life, out of Winnipeg. Now there isn't much you can do about the sun. When it does, or doesn't, shine is sort of out of our hands (I think - I seem to remember a show that had some machines with weather-changing abilities, though I can't remember if it was on the Discovery Channel or Dr Snuggles). But what we can deal with is the dirt. You see, Winnipeg uses sand to spread over the icy roads instead of salt, which many other cities use to make their streets drivable. . While salt is more corrosive, sand is... well, sandy. As the winter rolls on, the snow banks on the side of the road look less and less like SNOW and more and more like hills of dirt. Cars get dirty, buildings get dirty, people get dirty... and NOT in the good way! With everything under a fine layer of sand, the city goes from a wonderful cornucopia of colours to a city of neutral tones.