just teasing...

as i pulled out of the drive this morning, i noticed the ground was pretty stiff. any water in the road was frozen and cracked and crinckled if i rode over it. pedaling on, i was thinking of several things but none of them included snow which would have turned me around and taken the truck to work. it was chilly but after the hill on rt 4, i was warm enough to take off my hood and unzip a couple of inches. i was glad that i had gone back into the house and grabbed my neck scarf as when i tipped down the wind blasted right in the face.  why, no matter what direction i seem to be pedaling is the wind mostly direct on my nose?

after a session with the ces third graders i got involved helping with some tech matters and failed to notice what the weather was doing outside. i wondered why the kids and adults were coming and going to recess all bundled up like it was winter. the answer: it was snowing out, snowing fairly hard and blowing--in my face again. as i type now the temp hovers around 30 fahrenheit, with snow still coming and going. a couple of inches on the truck. i took a picture of my return tire track on the drive which had been totally clear when i left. one happy thought, at least they had not spread salt!

unofficial spring...

has sprung--and a few among us, like me, are less than happy. not that i begrudge anybody the warm, heck i was out saturday raking the drive smooth, the frost being pretty much out of the ground. but, i have yet to put away my skis. they stand in the corner on the porch, laughing at me every time i come out without a jacket, hat, or gloves.


pam and i both started a long walk up and over town hill with our jackets on. they were tied around the waist soon enough, but at around 40 degrees and somewhat 'moist' out, it was the long up hill that made them too warm. surprisingly, there was still ice in the big puddle on the right of way and some large frozen ice spots just past that. the hemlocks shade that area hard so it was not at all crazy to see even with the big thaw we have had. 

up in this area the frost is releasing the ground more slowly. head size rocks, pushed up by frozen water below them, sink back an inch or more as you step on them. some have even fallen back on their own leaving a crater like hole where they had pressed the earth up. now and again you step on some leaves that look frozen but crack and sink with your weight. 




the trees are still sleeping and hopefully they will stay that way for some time. maple sap ran so early this year, but the couple tappers i have talked to report it is not a big year. hannah's dad, bill, made two gallons compared to last years twenty two. things can still freeze back up, but we went past meteorological winter last wednesday. 

it is an interesting time to be out in the woods--wicked and weird as buck 65 puts it!

i found this today jumping around on the internet: Iktsurapok an inuit word more useful to us citizens of the digital universe than umpteen expressions for varieties of snow. here's how the blogsite mental floss characterizes the expression: 

"you know that feeling of anticipation when you're waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they're there yet? this is the word for it."

it occurs to me that iktsuarpok might enrich modern english, where it could just as easily refer to the obsessive checking of email and facebook to see wheter anyone's contacted you in the past 30 seconds. even the tradition inuit did it, eh? social networking and our obsessive-compulsive dipping for dopamine rools.  colin piprell.

march madness...

the forecast is for temps to possibly hit the 60's this week--that doesn't bode well for my two big snow dumps, the ones i am not holding my breath for. still, there is a month and a half that i can dream. if it gets too warm there won't be any ice on canaan street for april fool's polar dip. we shall see.

this past week, at least since the cold came back after the rain on wednesday, has been interesting. i expected the couple inches of snow to soak up the rain and ruin last weeks smooth-ish ice. instead, the rain totally smoothed out the surface and i skated twice on thursday. in the morning, at the end of the first time around the perimeter i turned into the northern outlet bay, where crowell's dock is, with my head down, pushing against a fairly strong wind. at some point i must have looked up and saw something strange. about twenty feet in front of my skates, there was open water--what? a ten-fifteen foot gap in skatable ice stretched from the cardigan point all the way across to the canaan street side. i had never seen an opening here before and wondered what the heck might have caused it, beyond the warm weather tuesday into wednesday. i got pictures of it on saturday when it was a bit more iced over. i still didn't cross it.

i came back that evening and went around again and thought i saw skip putting his skates on down at the crowell's dock. sure enough it was him so i hollered a couple of times and got his attention. he made it around the opening by going up on the shore. he couldn't explain the watery divide either but we had a good skate until it was getting pretty dark and he cut back through the woods at the shore and i turned back to the town beach.

pam and i got out again both saturday and sunday for a couple of hours each. i decided to take the kite and see what i could do with it on a glass smooth surface. saturday was too windy, and sunday was not windy enough. oh well, the sun was bright and the skating was good.








on the way around the lake we like to stop and chat up the fishing folk. saturday we saw an old student of mine--from sadie's class, '06--and someone who worked with the dirt digger on the first house i built in canaan back in '83. sunday we came across another even older student--graduated in '98--with his two kids. on the other side of the lake our district superintendent, who started teaching with me back in the day was set up through several holes. he and his two boys and wife were skating around as they fished. it is more likely than not that when ever we go out, skating or what have you, i run across somebody connected with my school days.


pam calls them 'koby sitings' ever since a particular funny greeting one of my students gave me, yelling out his truck window as he power slid past us on our bikes! it doesn't seem all that funny or memorable until i tell you that minutes before i had told pam that we wouldn't be seeing anybody way the heck out on back roads two towns over...


two fine weeks of ice will certainly help get us through this 'open' winter, but i am getting closer and closer to admitting this has been a bummer of a season. our friend billy b. who came up with his family a few weeks ago, wrote and spoke of how he thought winter seemed pretty much over--at least down in rhode island. he was glad we got out in the woods to ski--his only time and just my second. obviously i would rather ski, but this winter i am getting used to not...

how to make good ice...

flood an already frozen--but rough--pond or lake with inches of rain and then drop the temperature--

pam and i went out skating for a couple of hours saturday and again sunday, enjoying the resurfacing from the "inches of rain" wednesday and thursday and solid cold friday night.


saturday ice was pretty hard with a few rough spots where snow had built up. the temperature in the teens, twenties maybe, and not too much wind. you could skate just about anywhere and not slow down too much. the first two pictures were taken saturday. the one above shows smart's mtn in the background. we saw three groups ice fishing folk and stopped to talk to a few we knew. nobody had caught any thing of note--yet...


sunday was much warmer. in fact it was so warm--close to fifty--that by the time we left around 1:00, standing water was starting to cover most of the lake. one had to be careful as if you got off the darker, solid areas your skate blades would sink into the softer ice. the fish holes were still about a foot thick out on the main ice.


the edges were a different story. we tried first to get onto goose pond, both south at the dam and north at the boat ramp. the ice was thin to none from the shore to five-ten feet out, some places even wider. i suppose with a plank or waders one could get to the thicker stuff and i assume that is how the ice fishing folk got out there. we saw one spot by the beach that looked all broken up out to the solid ice--that was probably where the people parked at the dam went across. all the rain we have had over the past couple of weeks has raised the water level of lakes, ponds, and rivers. there is a good amount of flood water in the usual low areas too.



still a fine day to be outside and playing around. we saw josh l. fishing again today and his wife and daughter were skating about too. as we skated into the wind one time, i thought about the kite. conditions like this would not be all that bad for a little power kite action. a little wet if you fell, but at least you would go screaming across the surface. water slows things down.

 i made a few videos of pam and loaded one up for your enjoyment. the noise at the beginning is from a four wheeler racing across the ice. it was one of my former students going to pick up a fellow fishing buddy back at the town beach. after that stops you can 'hear' how soft and quiet it was skating.

ice is certainly the salient cover these days. i don't think i mentioned that thursday last week, my neighbor bob and i went up cardigan in the am. the icy sections that i had encountered the week before (with billy b and fam) were even icier this time. the water fall section was super thick ice with six inches of water rushing down different sections. fortunately we didn't have a dog with us--vader elected to stay home.

we are expecting warm with some rain for tomorrow and then "ice pellets" on wednesday. the ten day forcast has nothing all that cold coming in anytime soon...maybe hannah was right, i should set up the ice boat. winter can be strange in new england.

more rain...

i must admit, this weather pattern of some snow, changing to what some weather people are calling a "wintery mix" (kathryn shulz in the new yorker has a great take on this expression--an "airborne depravity", a "meteorlogical pox", exactly my sentiments!), and then going completely over to rain is starting to test my zen approach to the lack of snow.

ok, yesterday i got pam to go out after work and skate around canaan street and the ice was really good, considering. i flew around the bays and across the middle one last time to meet back with pam who opted to stop as it got darker and darker. it was a good workout i felt in my knees until bedtime.

and saturday i went out with billy buffum--a long time friend from pinkham notch, amc days--testing a backcountry set up on the soft, wet three inches atop the thin icy base layer. we made a big loop, scaling up easily and sliding down at mixed speeds. it was right at billy's comfort level which made him happy.



the friday before, i took billy, his wife tracey, and daughter iona up for a winter tour of cardigan. we mixed up the trails to keep off as much ice as possible. that got ridiculous fast and in the end, we all put the crampons on, took them off for the rock on top, put them back on at treeline, and took them off again toward the bottom. i even ferried the dog over a couple of major flows! thank goodness it was sunny and in the 20's for most of the hike. i remember iona being up there a couple of times over her 14 years, once flying the 3meter kite, but this was definitely a first with spikes on feet experience for her. tracey even claimed that at one point on the waterfall section she was as scared as she had ever been.

granted then, i have been outside and playing--but this warm is literally 'wearing'. schools were closed all over new hampshire today, including mascoma. i went out to scrape pam's car windows and was coated with freezing rain in a matter of minutes. but, like i told sawyer the other day, i am holding out--as opposed to holding in the breath--for two big dumps sometime before we give over to spring. after all it is still only february.

still, for this morning at least i am staying in, listening to music* or reading a book, drinking tea, eating chocolate...avoiding the "pulchritude" outside (read that shulz article). *london grammer's sights is playing in the background as i type--they are getting a lot of air time these days..."whatever the weather"!