Ice Forms

Well, February is over. It's still below freezing and we had a bit more snow last night, but I think winter is finally starting to lose its grip. I haven't been up to blogging lately. It turns out that planning a wedding, finishing a dissertation, teaching a class, and trying to prepare a talk that I'm supposed to give next week but really just want to avoid thinking about ... takes a lot of time and mental energy.

But I will post a couple pictures. One of the days last month during a really cold snap we went down to look at the lake. We hadn't been in some time because of the icy icy wind, but it certainly was interesting down there. The wind and waves had piled up plates of ice all along the shore. It wasn't cold enough for the whole lake to freeze, but cold enough for there to be quite a lot of these things, which looked to me like broken dishes.



It was getting a little too dark to photograph them well, but I thought they were really neat. Here is a close-up just in case you're curious about the details.

It was quite an interesting walk. When we got around to the harbor there were some other people walking in front of us, taking pictures like we were. One of them dropped her camera in the snow, and I only noticed it because I'm always looking at the ground for interesting stuff (habit from childhood). That was interesting all right. She was very glad to have it back.

We also saw three white swans swimming around in the ice. Don't they get cold?

Here are two more pictures I took. Can you tell from the quality of the light how cold it was?!