A Sneak Peak At Spring in Mississauga on New Year's Day

On New Year's Eve, the temperatures rose significantly with a weather front coming through that brought lots of rain too.  We had been bundling up with hats and mittens just to walk through a parking lot ever since we got here; and then overnight, the temperatures changed from daytime highs of -2 Celsius (that's 28.4 in Fahrenheit) with bone-chilling winds, to 9.5 (49 F) for 2 days.

Needless to say, we got ourselves outside for a walk and then hung out in the back yard for a little bit.

Just around the corner from our . . . house? condo? townhome?  (Still not sure what to call it.  It's huge, but attached to lots of others on both sides.)  Anyway, just around the corner, below street level, we discovered a very nice walkway alongside a large creek.  There are convenient steps down from the sidewalk, and you are shielded from a lot of the street noise and can take a nice walk for a great distance down among the trees along the banks.  It has been frozen solid - wish I had thought to take some photos at the time for a sort of "before and after" in this blog - but anyway, it's been frozen almost solid, with the water taking shapes that look almost like the freezing happened in a split second.  But on New Year's day, the creek looked quite different.  The quiet was chased away by the roar of muddy water, coming in torrents that obscured most of the rocky creek bed below.  Something to see!

The other magical thing was the mistiness of the air.  Here's another shot of the top of the neighboring skyscrapers being obscured by it.  Everything looked softer and calmer.

It's back down to 2 degrees Celsius this morning.  I looked outside and spotted a few flakes of snow gently falling toward the stiff looking grass.