Hair Ice

With apologies to all those who come here looking for kid pics, I'm posting this image for my own enjoyment. I observed this strange ice formation a few days after Christmas, and took this very mediocre snapshot of it. I saw this in several areas near the house and along the road, in areas of chipped wood groundcover over mud. It looks like a thicket of ice tendrils growing upwards from the chips. Each tendril is perhaps 1/16" wide and up to three inches long. I assumed it was coming somehow from liquid water in the mud being forces upward through pores and freezing on hitting the cold air, but in one of the plate of shrimp moments, this article swam into my ken. I now think that I was seeing "hair ice".

More Holiday Fun

So what else did we do over the Winter Holidays? Oh, nothing much ... unless you count buying a house. packing everything* into trailers and moving! We've decamped from Elk Mountain (debate continues about what to do about the name of this blog), moving a few miles away to a nearby town. We felt we were driving down there pretty much every day, so it made sense to move there. So far, so good --- the kids seem to be enjoying it a lot, and we've been able to get out and walk to places as we'd never been able to while living in the country.

So, for pictures: the last family meal in Elk Mountain; a pretty sunrise through the door; crossing the threshold as a family; and the first family meal in the new place --- which we're calling The White House, by the way.


       

* "everything" isn't accurate --- we moved most of the furniture while we had helpers, and some of the boxable stuff, but a lot remains to be moved.

More Christmas

A few more pics of family and friends at Christmas

       

Christmas!

Okay, I'm a slow blogger, but here's Christmas Day (better late than never, right?) It was a fine Christmas morning, complete with loads of paper to be ripped, aggrevating packaging to be mangled, small parts to be lost (and found days later, fortunately), and gift piles to be carefully scrutinized for "fairness".