Eli ([personal profile] eub) wrote2004-01-06 11:42 pm

ice and snow

On Sunday, the lake had made beautiful bits of clinging ice from dipping and from spray. This was hard-core, for Seattle, I figured.

Now look at it. There is ice on the lake, and snow on the ice. Does that happen?

It's only ice in parts. Most of the lake is barely-gelled slush that will hardly bear a dyne. A small boy was testing it delicately with his foot; "Can you read that sign right there?" asked his mother. "Keep... off... ice," he read. "This is not ice!"

The waterfowl tread trails into it, and travel in trains along the trails, like students on a snowy college campus. The coots break new trails more than the mallards, that I saw; sometimes a coot will tire of playing the slushbreaker (with its silly unwebbed feet, too) and half-fly for a stretch, until it feels it would rather sit and break slush. It makes a decelerando (a "gradient"? a what?) of footmarks as it gains speed, and then a sitzmark.

The ice is quite something, if you get to play games with the contrast.

Many kids sledding. I was out of battery, and shy.

Looking up one of the three big droopy gymnosperms near the north end was an uncannily beautiful line of sight, but I didn't catch it right.

(Hm. Jacobson is far more a tree-visiting menu than a tree identification manual.)

I hadn't seen, someone decorated a tree a bit north of the crosswalk.

Only in Seattle?
cellio: (mandelbrot-2)

[personal profile] cellio 2004-01-07 08:05 am (UTC)(link)
Ooh, nifty pictures. Thanks!

[identity profile] jinian.livejournal.com 2004-01-07 02:27 pm (UTC)(link)
That is just what Jacobson is, yes.

I've never seen the umbrella thing in real snow before, just wet slushy kind where it makes sense. How can they not want snowflakes on their hair?