Signed, Someone from Houston, Tx
I grew up in Alberta. It is cold and dry and has a short summer. I prefer the weather here even if the summers can be a bit too humid and hot for me.
But aside from that it's a great place to live. Land is cheap, you can get good local food anywhere, and we're safe from nearly every natural disaster you can think of. Just bring a jacket.
In reality the bulk of the nastiest storms here in Ontario come over the lakes from northern Michigan, which is, yes, north of us. Look on a map, most of the heavily populated areas of Canada are as far south as northern California. The parts that are north of the 49th are much less populated.
Yes, periodically there is a nasty cold front coming down from Hudson's bay, but the prevailing winds and weather patterns are west to east. So most of our weather blows over from the midwest U.S.
The really nasty awful cold weather last year for example, hit the U.S. midwest harder and nastier first.
So, yup, we tend to refer to snow and cold as coming from Canada.
Unlike Houston, where it's crazy hot and humid all the time, and there's nothing you can do about it except for hide inside in the air conditioning.
No, the problem with Canada recently has been that it's been too warm. It's hard to really appreciate winter if it's too warm to go skiing or skating. We got close to an inch of rain on Sunday here in Ottawa that really messed up our snow. :(
I'll take the weather in pretty much anywhere in Canada over the weather in Houston any day.
I will complain about the lack of sunshine in the wintertime here, though. That's just depressing.
It's 65 and sunny in Houston today, it's 16 and snowing in Ottawa.
There's little snow, and we get tons of sunshine. When it does get cold, it's dry, so it doesn't feel as bad as a warmer temp on the coasts. You get reprieves in the form of chinooks too, where the temperature will jump up 20 degrees for a week or two. It's above freezing here today, but it was at -20C on Friday.
There is a tech scene here as well, and it's starting to get a bit more traction now that oil and gas aren't eating up all the brain power. Getty Images has offices here, and there are start-ups in and out of the energy industry. It'll be interesting to see what the city looks like in 10 years. Lots of folks are calling for it to be the next Detroit, but it doesn't really seem to be going that way.