Rain, rain, go away: Has spring sprung in Vancouver or did we just spring a leak?

Spring has theoretically sprung here on the West Coast, but you wouldn't know it through the sheets of grey rain currently dousing the city.

And the rain is here to stay.

CBC meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe says the system bringing us rain will stay until Friday morning. By that point, like a series of unfortunate events, another system will come to replace it, hitting us with more rain and bonus winds on Sunday.

"I don't see any extended period of sunshine for next week either," Wagstaffe said.

The truth hurts, even when it's delivered by a nice person.

It rained about 13 days last month in Vancouver, according to Environment Canada — which sounds tolerable, until you consider it rained 16 days in February and 24 days in January. We wrote then about how much it sucked.

But is there no sadder metaphor for this depressing spring than the fact the coast's bunnies — spring's most darling harbingers — are currently dying from a deadly virus where they succumb to massive hemorrhagic bleeding?

Sad.

But maybe we have it easy on the West Coast.

This week in southern Ontario, gale force winds knocked down trees, crushed a construction crane and felled an absurdly large bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Meanwhile, icy temperatures swept across the Prairies, with parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba reaching a bone-chilling –27 C. Southern Alberta received 20 centimetres of a four-letter word worse than rain.

Even the East Coast was walloped by a frigid nor'easter, which shut down businesses and schools last week.

West Coasters were burdened with a torrent of temperature snapshots from family and friends from across the country, accompanied by existential screaming: "Why do we live here?"

We don't know, we said, staring out into the endless rows of waterlogged cherry blossoms.

But, man, that rain.