Winter wonderland

I got up this morning late, as usual. The change to Daylight Savings Time certainly wasn't helping me any in this matter -- my alarm clock insisted it was 0600, while my body was firmly convinced that it was 0500 and that I still had another hour to sleep before I had to get up. Eventually I pried myself out of bed, removed my wrist splints and started getting dressed. When I opened the blinds on the bedroom window I was stunned to see the landscape outside coated with snow. Stranger yet was that with each gust of wind I could watch clouds of snow blow past in the parking lot, indicating that the snow shower wasn't over and yet more was cascading down.

When I was talking with neowolf2 last night he'd mentioned that the weather report was predicting a significant amount of snowfall for this area, but I figured that it would either miss us or melt as soon as it hit the ground. I don't think I've ever been so amazingly wrong in a guess about the weather before, but there you have it. The snow that the meteorologist predicted arrived, and it accumulated quite quickly, proving once again that the Midwest is indeed an interesting place to live if only because of the weather. I love this region for that very reason -- it's like a potluck dinner, you just don't know what you're going to find from day to day.

Once I'd truly woken up I took care of feeding Ra and prepared my satchel with the necessary goods for a day at work, then stepped out to start the truck so the cab would have a chance to warm up. I hate driving to work in a cold vehicle, it makes me feel miserable and has generally unpleasant affects on my attitude for the day (or at least it does until I warm up again, which is a slow process for me). Once I actually got outside and took a look around I couldn't believe how much snow accumulation there was. The snow itself was heavy and wet -- in fact it was so heavy that when I started the pickup's windshield wipers they could only move about halfway up the glass before the weight of the snow became too much for them. I had to fight with the truck's bench to get the seat back moved forward, and once I'd accomplished that I was able to retrieve my snow brush (I had stashed it away a week or so ago, thinking that with the end of March I was safely out of snow season. I didn't see any reason to have it cluttering up the cab any longer, and I needed the foot space since Kestral was riding with me to BD's for lunch that evening). After I had cleaned my truck off so that I could see out the glass again (with the added benefit that the windshield wipers wouldn't break under the load of the snow when I tried to remove the remaining flakes) I attacked kestral's truck as well as roho's car, thus making sure they wouldn't have to deal with scraping their vehicle windows themselves. I had forgotten my gloves when I went outside so when I came back in to grab my digital camera my fingers were tingling quite angrily from the cold and I found myself clenching my fists a few times in an effort to encourage my circulation to start working properly again (damn my recklessness in youth -- all that frostbite has contributed to this, I know it has). I'm guessing that with the windchill effect the temperature was somewhere between 10 and 15 degrees F, if not lower.

I took a few pictures from the safety of my bedroom, then loaded the camera into my trench coat and braved the outdoors again since it was time for me to drive to work. I wasn't in any particular hurry to get on the road because I knew that traffic was going to be an absolute wreck (and I was right, it took me the better part of an hour and 45 minutes to reach the office because traffic was just creeping along on the freeway) so I lingered about the parking lot to take a few pictures of the apartment itself and a few more shots of the general area. I'll post the photos later tonight once I download them from the camera and sort through them all. For every ten pictures I take with that camera I probably only get one or two pictures that aren't blurry (stupid lousy shutter speed), and out of those I only find a few that look acceptable after being color-corrected and tweaked in Adobe Photoshop. But I had to take pictures to show just how much snow we'd gotten, because I don't think anybody who isn't actually living here will believe that we got this much snow on the 7 th of April.

In honor of this unexpected shift in weather I've decided to share one of the gifts given to me by somebody special.

( Read on for the vignette.... )

Picture it, if you will...

I've put the pictures of the snow from this morning up on my gallery. You can access it by going to http://feren.black-panther.us/gallery/snow/ and poking around. There's one or two good shots and a lot of lousy ones that tend to be rather repetitive, but that's how you learn to deal with a camera. I'm still learning to deal with this digital bugger, and I was reminded of that today when I discovered how to activate the digital zoom. I was completely surprised by finding that feature, I had completely forgotten the stupid thing came with digital zoom.

I am immensely pleased with one and only one photo from the entire batch, and that is the picture I took on a total lark on my way out of the office. I came outside, discovered I still had the camera in my pocket and started looking around for something to shoot. Since I didn't see anything else that was interesting in the building's parking lot I approached one of the ice-glazed trees and saw a knob sticking out. Suddenly I was hit with the desire to take a photo of that knot, complete with the ice coating it. When I found out that regular mode just wasn't going to hack it I switched the camera over to Macro mode, something I've only experimented with fleetingly in the past. That picture is the result. I'm incredibly glad that I brought the camera along, just because I got that one photo out of the deal.

My drive home saw a number of other photo opportunities, with snow-encrusted evergreens and brambles along the shoulder of I-290. Unfortunately with the construction there is no shoulder for me to pull over onto, so I had to pass by without taking any photos. I'm a little disappointed by this development because the way the snow was clinging to those trees it looked like it was confectioner's sugar that had been lovingly sifted onto the branches.

Such is life, I suppose. Perhaps next winter I'll have a newer, better camera to take the pictures with and will get some even better photographs to share.

She's a midnight rider on a shooting star