Odd snow

[altivo]

Snowing on and off all day, not a lot of accumulation, but after dusk it changed from sleet pellets and little hair-like rods into a form I've seen only rarely. Rather than the usual hexagonal crystals with many-branched arms, we started getting little flakes of crystal, transparent and flat with irregular edges, like shards of very fine glass. They vary in size from a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch or more, The notable thing is that, like glass, they catch light and refract it. Lying in heaps on the ground they look like broken glass. Falling through the air in front of car headlights, they look like glitter, sparkling quite brilliantly. Unusually beautiful, and fragile. I'm sure they won't survive the night in most places. Of course the roads were still slippery and the wind has picked up and is making the earlier powdery snow drift across roads too.

Two new displays up in the library, both interesting I think. One is in honor of Edgar Allen Poe's 200th birthday (Jan. 19) and includes a pair of ghostly hands holding a copy of The Tell-Tale Heart as well as the mandatory white bust with a raven perched on top of it. Our most artistic staff member put it together with antiques interspersed with the books.

The other is our kick-off for the library's centennial year (founded in 1909) and consists of the ten best selling books in the US from that year. We went to used booksellers to get copies that are actually that old, and they look quite nice with the elaborate embossed covers and occasional color plate embedded in the binding. I'm actually looking forward to reading a couple of them, including The Silver Horde by Rex Beach, set in Alaska presumably during the gold rushes and featuring a fashionable woman and a dog team on the cover. Beach wasn't Jack London, exactly, but he was a commercial success and must be readable.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

No snow here. We got ICE. Lethal, fatal ice. Lovely. :/

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Do things close down then to reduce traffic?

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

No need. The roads are gritted to melt the ice and allow safe transit for vehicles. It's the footpaths that they don't bother gritting, so it's up people who walk to bus stops that have to risk slipping. Before Christmas, I had to use iron railings to hold onto, and used them to pull myself along. Walking was just too potentially fatal.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You need some Yak-Trax or equivalent then. Those are curly springs of stainless steel that fasten across the soles of your shoes or boots with rubber and velcro straps. I got a set for Gary last year because we always have icy patches around the barns in winter. They seem to work quite well. He says you still have to be cautious, but they grip even on glare ice. They were only about $20 US from a sporting goods supply house.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

A leaky gutter on my house, dripping water onto the path outside my home has created such an icy patch. When I came home on Tuesday night it was particularly bad. I thought to myself that if I did not take action to stop passers by (it's a public footpath) slipping on it, I would be sued for "failing in my duty of care to the public" or something like that. So I threw some rock salt down.

I mentioned it in passing at work, and it just so happens that the corporate legal guy was listening in. He informed that far from facing prosecution for "failing in my duty of care to the public" by failing to grit; the fact I had taken the time to grit a public path automatically makes ME responsible for that. Thusly if anyone DID slip after I put salt down, I would be prosecuted for failing to do the job properly. Whereas if I had not bothered at all, nothing would have happened as the path is not my responsibility. The lesson I learned form that? It's just not worth giving a damn about anyone in this day and age.

Either way, sadly we get none of the fun of the cold (snow), just the danger that goes with it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've heard that theory before, and some court decisions in the US have held that view. However, others would still blame you because it was your leaky gutter that created the icy patch. Go not to the lawyers for advice, for they will tell you both yes and no.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

In other words: "it depends on what mood the prosecutor is in on the day." Wonderful! I really must get that gutter fixed.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Oooh! I walked to the train this morning past the lawns covered with glittery windowpanes of snow.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Pretty remarkable, eh? If you try to get close to them, your breath dissolves them almost instantly. I've seen photos of snowflakes that took the form of little hexagon-shaped tiles of glass, with symmetrical slits in them rather like a negative image of the usual six-branched starfish shape. I imagine this was something close to those, either broken up or not quite fully formed. What I was able to see seemed fairly irregular in shape, but they were so fragile that they might have partly melted or sublimed even as they fell through the air.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

My uneducated guess would be that the water must have had some impurities in it, hence the irregular shape. Also the temperature may play a role with it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This was high altitude snow, so impurities should be minimal. I agree that temperature variations as the snow fell through the air could have altered the shape, as could humidity changes.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Just how many people are celebrating their 200th this year? Apparently Lincoln and Darwin are also having their 200th.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Check Wikipedia for "People born in 1809" to see a large list. Most of them were politicians we never heard of. Darwin, Lincoln, and Poe were there, as was Gladstone (prime minister of Britain.) Lincoln is the big deal here, since he was from Illinois, and we have to do several events because of that.