Glenn Kubish

  The little Three Things podcast  is where each week I try to notice three things that I noticed that made me happy or grateful. Not the biggest things in the world, just things like: 1.  Frazil Ice 🧊 🥘 In the days before the North Saskatchewan River freezes, it blooms with floating ice pads. These are those short days, and the mosaic pieces of ice are called frazil pans.  Frazil, F-R-A-Z-I-L, what a great word, the F-R of freeze and frigid and fragile, the shard of the Z, and the way the L lingers and trails off like in the words gentle and beautiful and peaceful. My hydrologist friend Steffen can explain how frazil ice forms at northern latitudes when the atmospheric conditions and heat exchanges are conducive to its making. I phoned Steffen at his ice-free retirement home and we talked ice. I asked him if he missed frazil ice.  “I definitely miss them,” he said from Ladysmith, BC. “I loved going onto the Terwillegar footbridge and just watching them go by....

Now that Edmonton winter 2012 is losing its grip on us, it's time to get a handle on it. #$&#!*$ Because this year, I tried something different. I had to. All but one of my 48 winters have been spent in Edmonton, and that means I know in my bones what that season can deliver. Endless blue skies and jewelled nights, sure, but also cold and snow and dark and wind. And wind and dark and snow and cold. The moaning around the frozen water cooler. Winter in Edmonton can dent the spirit. Paree When the world was the street where I lived, it was different. I just accepted that for a few months, I wouldn't be able to see the pavement of that street—and, so, we played street hockey on the ice and snow. But then I grew up and put away the childish things and realized that the pools of Las Vegas are really only three hours away. As the imaginary world grows more vivid (and, in some ways, more reachable thanks to seat sales, marketing and Westjet), the real world of snow o...