Posts Tagged ‘sublimation’
Magical Thinking
The horses appeared to be unfazed yesterday morning by the Arctic conditions that have been visiting us this week. I thought the magical sun dogs were a nice touch.
A beautiful visual to remind us how cold it is, in case we forget. I didn’t forget. The combination of my breath freezing on my mustache and a persistent runny nose serves as a constant reminder.
I didn’t do a very good job of keeping my mind clear of concerns about our national chaos when I was tending to the horses, but I managed to flip it around a little bit. Don’t know if they picked up on it or not.
Without coming to an inspiring conclusion, I decided to try a mental exercise of searching for a scenario that would somehow end the sickening slide to the destruction of our democracy we are suffering. Call it magical thinking.
Is there something that could influence the people who have the authority to end the corruption to come to their senses and act in the country’s interests?
Are there economic sanctions that could be enacted by other countries to interrupt the cash flow to the profiteers fleecing anything that can be fleeced? Is there an unnoticed hero-in-the-making in the ranks of the justice system who will show up with some key piece of irrefutable evidence that will allow every guilty associate of the mob running the scheme of the puppet master (somebody owns tRump) to be stopped in their tracks and held to account?
Is there a morning when we will wake up to discover our long national nightmare is over? Most importantly for me, will it happen in my lifetime? And which actor will play me in the movie?
For those of you who enjoy the phenomenon of snow sublimation as much as I do, I decided to scrape off the inch-plus of accumulated snow on the driveway near the house in the morning. When I saw how much cleaner the asphalt was by the afternoon, I decided to clear a little more.
No melting occurs at our below-zero (F) temperatures, but the pavement dries right up.
It’s like magic!
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Freeze Dried
There are days when a walk outside on our property feels like we are living in a high school science lab. Whether it’s Physics or Chemistry, the atmospheric conditions pretty much dominate everything. We intimately witness the emphatic difference between dead calm and gale-force winds, a transition that can happen in a startlingly short span of time.
Evidence of cold contracting materials and heat expanding them becomes an auditory experience with our log home as it creaks and groans, snaps and pops as the wood reacts.
After our most recent January thaw, the air made a swift swing to a hard freeze. Snow that was mushy on top and soaking wet at the base became a solid block overnight.
Around the edges of anything icy, we get to see one of my favorite winter phenomena: sublimation. The H2O molecules skip the liquid phase and transition from solid to gas, expanding invisibly into the cold, dry air above. Surfaces that appeared to be soaking wet during Tuesday’s meltdown froze solid overnight. By yesterday afternoon, a majority of the driveway had been freeze-dried. The same applies to most of the shingles on the roof and the boards of the house’s deck.
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We put blankets on the other three horses yesterday afternoon in advance of expected precipitation today, to be followed by a reasonable cold snap.
Each blanket has straps on the inside that get routed around each of their back legs to hold the sides of the blanket in place. A week or two ago, Cyndie reported finding a stray strap lying in the snow. It looked like one of those side straps to me. We both assumed that one of the horses had managed to ‘toss’ it from their blanket.
Here is one of life’s little mysteries that keeps things interesting, and yes, it is related to “assuming.” The last blanket we put on was Swings’ and when I didn’t find a side strap on my side, I asked Cyndie to bring me the strap she had found in the snow, assuming the puzzle was solved.
Imagine my surprise when I reached up under the blanket, trying to locate the D-ring to clip the strap to, and found there was already a strap connected to it that I hadn’t noticed. The strap had gotten hung up over her back instead of hanging down like the rest of the straps to be attached.
So the question remains, where did the strap Cyndie found in the snow come from? We have no idea.
It’s a good thing we are only caring for 4 horses. I can’t imagine trying to keep track of things for a larger herd, given the number of times things get confusing with just our quartet of mares.
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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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Relative Something 