More Science
This is so cool. In a wonderful compliment to the fascinating sublimation of ice off our deck that I wrote about last week, yesterday we were treated to the other side of that coin, so to speak: deposition.
The air is loaded with moisture this week, and we are experiencing some gorgeous hoar-frost.
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“When these water vapor molecules contact a subfreezing surface, such as a blade of grass, they jump directly from the gas state to solid state, a process known as “deposition”, leading to a coating of tiny ice crystals.”
Hoarfrost: The Science Behind Frost on Steroids
By Jon Erdman – October 20 2015 07:00 AM EDT – weather.com
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The scenery on my drive home from work yesterday just kept getting more and more spectacular as I approached our ranch. Views of the hillsides covered with flocked trees across the landscape are absolutely intoxicating.
The first time I saw a Christmas tree flocked completely white when I was a kid, I thought it looked ridiculous. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would want such a bizarre looking tree. In time, I came to recognize the artificial trees were mimicking the inspiring look of hoar-frost.
Now I understand, sort of.
While out walking to a high spot in the hay-field with Delilah to take pictures of the barn with the flocked trees as a backdrop, I received a vivid demonstration of how much our darling Belgian Tervuren enjoys snow. In a blink, she appeared to regress back to a puppy and romped in the deep powder with reckless abandon.
It is rewarding to see her so happy, as she has suffered a bit of neglect in the last few weeks, between Cyndie’s illness and the sudden death of Legacy. She has been very patient and a wonderful companion during this time, which leads us to want to reward her with opportunities to play and be the center of our attention again.
It’s another kind of science. Animal love.
Letting a dog thrive at doing what dogs love to do with the people who take care of them.
Getting to do it in a natural wonderland of spectacular frosted trees is a bonus!
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Looking Around
Without a doubt, one of the best rewards for receiving over a foot of snow in one day is the beautiful landscape views we get to enjoy for days after.
Cyndie has been capturing and sharing a series of sunrise photos for me in the last couple of weeks. This fleeting glimpse of sunshine from yesterday was the only view of the ball of fire that she got all day. Clouds filled in shortly after the picture was taken and gray ruled the rest of the day.
Luckily, it just so happens that a gray winter sky provides really nice light for taking pictures.
I think Cyndie has acquired a keen sense of what appeals to me in photographs.
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If she had put these images on my computer without telling me, I would have thought I’d taken the pictures myself.
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So Much
What a difference a day makes. On Monday, the storm was inundating us with so much snow that we struggled to deal with it. The intensity created an impression that it might never end. Yesterday, if it weren’t for the huge amount of snow now covering everything, it was as if the storm had never happened. It’s like the drama of Monday was just a dream.
Yesterday, the interstate was almost dry, the sun was out, and visibility was crystal clear.
When I got home from work, I had to immediately pick up where I had left of with the plowing on Monday. After a few quick passes up and down the driveway to clear the couple of inches that had fallen overnight, I focused my attention on clearing the area around the hay shed and barn.
It was a laborious and tedious process of wrestling the Grizzly through deep snow, on the icy slope dropping from the driveway to the barn. I got stuck several times, but scrambled my way out each time by some crazy maneuvering back and forth, to and fro.
Other than some cleanup needed around the edges with a shovel, I’m declaring the driveways now complete.
You know that clean deck I was showing off a week or so ago?
That will be the next project. The wind didn’t blow it clean this time.
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Big Dump
Winter decided to dump a big snowfall on us over a very short amount of time yesterday. I knew it was going to be enough that I should get out in the middle of it to plow at least once before it was all over, but I wasn’t sure when that would be.
It took longer than we expected for the snowfall to start, and then the accumulation built rather slowly to about 2 inches. The next time I glanced outside from my perch by the fire, that amount had more than doubled. It was time to get out and plow or else it would be too late for my plan of working with reasonable amounts of snow.
As it was, the Grizzly ATV, as a snow plow, was just barely capable of the task. The first thing I did was get it buried and stuck sideways off the edge of the pavement where all four wheels just spun on the icy layer below. I needed to dig out all the snow packed underneath it, and then spin those tires until I gradually slid sideways enough to become mobile again.
After that, I decided to stay focused on just opening up the main driveway as wide as I could get it. The Grizzly does not command full control when trying to push large amounts of snow. The snow pushes back and tends to dictate what progress can be made.
I tried making more passes, while taking smaller bites with the blade each time, but the outer edges just grew unwieldy and the snow rolled back down behind me, such that I wasn’t really gaining much added width.
In the areas of tight confines, we resorted to hand shoveling, which allowed me to toss the snow up over the massive banks that quickly developed.
The snow was coming down at peak rates of multiple inches per hour while we worked, covering our tracks as fast as we made them, but every shovel width made was that much less snow I would need to move by the end of the storm. Cyndie was working up around the house and I was by the shop garage.
I watched the county plow truck make two passes in front of our property which meant there was going to be a new pile at the end of the driveway to clean up. Cyndie headed to the barn to put the horses in for the night and I finished cleaning edges where she had shoveled.
Cold, wet, and tired, I was ready for a break, but I noticed the falling snow had slowed considerably. It would be dark soon and there were already three fresh inches on the driveway in the hour-and-a-half since I first plowed.
I started up the ATV again and cleaned the driveway a second time. Of course, doing so throws snow in a couple spots that need to then be cleaned up by hand shoveling. My gloves were soaked through and I so wanted to be done, but there was a dog waiting anxiously to be let out for her afternoon walk.
Make that “run.” Delilah dragged me along as fast as I could trot as we headed down the plowed driveway while she searched for any opening to explore. There were none. It was down the driveway and back, except for a couple surprising leaps into the deep snow that she quickly aborted.
I measured 9 inches while shoveling, and I could see we got at least 3 more by the time I plowed the second time. It fell hard and fast all afternoon. I definitely made the right decision to stay home yesterday. That was a really big dump.
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Mental Preparation
This morning, I am kicked back in the recliner in front of the fire, enjoying the calm before the storm. We have been warned. Our region is about to experience a narrow band of snow with a huge gradient in amounts from 1 to 12 inches. As of now, our county still appears to be sitting dead center in the heaviest snow zone.
The predictions are regularly updated, and weather service computer models will present shifts to the north or south as the time-to-event shrinks, so I am excitedly refreshing the live updates in hopes of determining if the worst is to come. I like to be totally prepared.
This will be the second Sunday in a row when the Minnesota Vikings will be engaged in the high competition of this season’s NFL playoffs and we have a distraction interfering with my ability to give the game my undivided attention.
I’m framing that as a good thing.
What choice do I have?
The forecast is ominous enough that I am already thinking I will stay off the roads tomorrow and miss a day of work. That hurts double because we are so busy at the day-job that I worked on Saturday in attempt to make extra headway toward keeping up. Missing Monday is a stab in that plan.
The Federal Government is in a shutdown mess, so my local concerns feel a little petty in comparison. The President had the gall to claim the Women’s March was celebrating “unprecedented economic success and wealth creation.” Ouch. So much ugliness.
Thank goodness I can hug Cyndie, walk outside and toss hay, stack firewood, coo to our chickens and breathe in the scent of our horses hair.
It helps me to mentally prepare for whatever tomorrow is going to bring.
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Relative Sadness
There is an aspect of grief that I visualize as wrestling an octopus. You can be engaged in the action for an immeasurable amount of time without ever having a clue if you’ve come close to pinning his shoulders to the mat.
Where the heck are octopus shoulders, anyway?
I’d love for nothing more than to have an official slapping their hand down to declare the match complete, or at least to call time on the end of a round. The clock never runs out though, and the round goes on endlessly while grief and I just keep wrestling and wrestling.
It occurred to me yesterday that I was somewhat unconsciously avoiding going out to the barn since last Sunday when Legacy’s life ended there. It’s a struggle, because I normally find great comfort in standing among the horses, but there is currently a profound disturbance of energy here. I’m feeling little capacity toward consoling our other horses and even less confidence in my ability to contain my own sorrow while in their midst.
Between the understandable waves of tearful sadness, there remain the troughs of intangible gloom. I recognize that space well.
It defined the bulk of my adolescent and early adult life, which was shrouded by dysthymia.
At least now I am armed with much greater knowledge and understanding of the dynamics of these mental squalls, and I recognize the current grief casting a pall over our lives is completely situational. There is unending love cradling our sorrow and it is nurturing our healing and growth.
After Cyndie and I walked Delilah around the property yesterday afternoon, we all ventured to the barn to look in on the horses.
I worry they might be feeling neglected after the intense attention paid to Legacy, and then his sudden departure followed by this incredible void.
They seem to me to be in a state of shock. All we can do for each other is vibrate our energy of sorrow and loss.
I’m not crying; you’re crying.
Dezirea actually stepped away from me, as if she couldn’t handle my grief. Hunter and Cayenne tolerated my attempts to give them some loving scratches, but I didn’t get a sense that either of the three of us felt much solace out of the exchange.
Cyndie spent a little more time with Dezirea. I think Dezi seems particularly sad. I am wondering if she is feeling some stress over the possibility she will inherit the ultimate responsibility of a leadership role, being the elder mare. It could just as easily be filled by any one of them, or maybe they will devise a perfect balance of power across all three.
It’s just that the four horses that were organized into a little herd over five years ago worked out so tremendously. They were a band. An ever-shifting combination of two sets of two. It was incredibly, preciously perfect.
Beyond our ability to fully appreciate when they first arrived.
Now they’ll never be able to get the band back together again…
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Aww, here comes another slippery hold from that octopus, dagnabbit.
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Interesting Science
I was actually beginning to write this interesting science post last Sunday morning, back when it was so cold outside, but then Cyndie burst in to announce we had a horse emergency. Boy, did we.
I spent a little time with the three chestnuts after I got home from work yesterday. They were mostly preoccupied with munching the freshly served hay that Cyndie had just put in the boxes, but there were some brief moments of acknowledgement from each of them.
They seemed a little hapless to me. It could just as easily be a projection of my own forlorn perspective, but they are obviously in the middle of trying to adjust to the sudden absence of their principle decision maker, so hapless feels like a logical possibility.
It snowed a lot on Sunday and Monday this week, so I also did some shoveling yesterday afternoon. The deck on the back side of the house had not been cleared since the snow piled up. I wanted to get that cleaned off before the next thaw arrives, which we are anticipating for the next few days, starting with this afternoon.
The last time I was writing about the deck was because it had remained surprisingly clear throughout the prior snowfall, partly because it had been so windy, and partly because that precipitation started as a drizzling rain. If you are a regular reader, you may recall that I posted a picture of it.
Well, by the afternoon of the very next day, the deck surface had changed so dramatically that I took another picture for comparison.
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I’ve written about this before, because it is a winter phenomenon that fascinates me. The ice sublimates from a solid to a gas without actually becoming liquid in between. It just disappears into cold, thin air.
If you enlarge the photo on the left, you can see the bumpy glaze of ice on the boards that formed as the relatively warm and wet precipitation started to fall. I originally posted that photo because I was amazed the several inches of snow that came out of the sky by the end of the event, never accumulated on the deck.
The wind kept the deck surprisingly clean.
By the afternoon of the next day, despite temperatures down around zero degrees (F), I glanced out and noticed that a large majority of the deck boards were now dry. There were hardly any of the icy bumps from the day before.
They hadn’t melted. The deck was completely dry. The frozen bumps had sublimated.
It’s like magic!
Or science.
Something like that.
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More Memories
I hope you will understand if I continue our memorial another consecutive day, but I only made it through half of the pictures I had collected when I composed yesterday’s post, and Legacy’s life was just too big to fit into one photo montage.
Actually, the steps of composing these posts is therapeutic for Cyndie and me in processing our grief, so indulge us another day of honoring Legacy’s recent passing.
Despite holding the important position of herd-leader, he sure seemed to have plenty of time for play and/or mischief.
He never missed an opportunity to nibble and disassemble fencing, gate chains, our electric fence charger, wheelbarrow handles, or any other random item left within his reach. Whenever I took on a project that was in or near the paddocks, he was quick to come over to perform an inspection.
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I repeatedly found myself mentioning to Cyndie that I had a supervisor watching over my every move.
If you look back at the first two pictures in yesterday’s post, there is a striking difference between the sleek look of his summer coat and his bushy growth for winter. When it came time to shed that long hair, we struggled to cope with the immensity of the event.
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Of course, no sooner would we get him cleaned up than he would go off to find the messiest possible spot to roll around.
In his role as herd leader, Legacy made a point of being the first to approach whenever I wandered up to the fence to take pictures of the horses together. Most of those pictures ended up being of Legacy with three horses behind him, but not always.
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One of the most precious things Legacy demonstrated was his keen sensitivity for visitors who may not have any horse experience, might be feeling anxious, or were too young to understand safety protocols. Legacy was often the first of our horses to volunteer for exercises with clients.
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He always took steps to assure every person received attention, not just when there happened to be treats being handed out.
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That being said, he was a major treat-hound when it came to that. The presence of treats may have been one situation where the herd’s best interests were dropped down a notch below his own. The day we brought out the bright red frozen treats, shown in yesterday’s montage, he commanded full, exclusive control until he had his fill. The resulting red lips were a real hoot.
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Legacy rarely demonstrated a need to demand respect, basically, because it wasn’t necessary. He was granted full authority by the herd. Delilah naively tested Legs a couple of times, but it was never a fair exchange. Equine smarts held the advantage in all of their interactions that I witnessed.
There were countless occasions when I watched the three chestnuts scrambling with each other to challenge a pecking order, but Legacy was above such shenanigans.
He left them alone as often as possible to work it out themselves, and they were always careful to avoid brushing into him while they skirmished.
There is an uncanny void in our midst which will be incredibly difficult to fill. Legacy can’t be replaced.
With all that he has done for us in our time with him here, Legacy’s wisdom and spirit will remain a permanent fixture, that’s for sure. We are incredibly blessed and so very lucky to have had the honor of him becoming an integral part of our Wintervale Ranch adventures.
For now, though, it’s goodbye physical Legacy, goodbye.
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