Wednesday is gonna SUCK !!!

Yeah that right there is the number one thing I'm not looking forward to. My entire vacation will be far below freezing, so this snow
is not going anywhere for a while.

 I got a foot with drifts closer to 2' !! The snowblower was NOT happy ! Not supposed to warm up for at least a week !

I personally wouldn't call it severe(that term I reserve for summer & thunderstorms), but....Got a fairly short lived but heavy snowstorm here this afternoon, its tapered off to just light snow now. All in all got maybe an inch or 2 out of it, but at its height it looked kinda like a blizzard.
Temp is supposed to get below zero tonight (lows the past couple nights have been single digits & we've gotten little bits of snow)

Tomorrow its supposed to get above freezing for the first time since friday. .lol.

Pretty much snowed the entire day in Southern Ontario...This storm might have surpassed the infamous storm in 1999 when Toronto had to call in the military for support.

Preheat-start ballasts exist which have integral starters. This means they have the typical four wires of an RS or TS ballast, but the characteristics of a preheat ballast. This seems to be more common for circline lamps for some reason. Here is a schematic I drew of what is likely inside these:
https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=0&pid=265862

Glow starters go bad. So much so that manufacturers felt the need to integrate them into the bases of some single-ended fluorescents to make replacement more simple. Because they go bad, they should be easily replaceable. This is usually facilitated by a socket that is accessible without fixture disassembly. So what did they choose to do with these integral-starter "self-start" ballasts? They potted the starter in tar, inside of a non-accessible component that is supposed to be a non-consumable, the ballast. Great idea.

I get that it is for space-saving purposes, especially for circline fixtures. But why didn't they just integrate the starter into the base of the circline lamp? What is the point of this buffoonery?

We've got a heatwave over here, got to about 40°c yesterday, but that's just here.

If I could fly to England, Australia or anywhere outside of the United States temporarily, I would do so immediately, with the remaining 8 days
I have off from work.
As of now it looks as if the snow has got me trapped inside, piled very high against my front door.
"Severe weather never sleeps," is very much correct.

@Eleco_SR304, is it cold over there? Honestly I'd rather be over there than here as of now. I hate winter with a thriving passion.

Yep it is cold. But remember in England there is no such thing as Winter or Summer 

@suzukir122 — same thing over here in SE PA. This may surpass the blizzard of 2016 we had. Currently we have about 8in total on the ground, two of which were from the previous storm. I'm going out to clean driveways in a few hours and make $$$.