Snoooooooow!

[liv]

I enjoyed seeing squee posts one after the other on my flist when it snowed in England this week. But I have to show off because here, we have proper snow. It snowed heavily last weekend, about 25cm in a few hours. And since then the temperature has been hovering between -5 and -10, so the snow has stayed. And it is very, very pretty!

A lot of this is new to me on a very physical level. The sensation of almost painfully cold air on my skin, and trying to cover up well enough that the minimum of skin is exposed to that. Whole new ways of feeling cold. Which kinds of snow and ice are safe to walk on or run on, new gaits to keep from falling over and to make motion less gruelling from using my muscles differently. I've been in weather like this a couple of times before, but in Britain this kind of thing would kill the infrastructure so it ends up being a free holiday. But here life goes on as normal, so I'm not playing in the snow, just adjusting my normal routine to a new climate.

Anyway, everywhere looks like a chocolate box so I've attempted to take some pictures. It's surprisingly hard to get good ones, because my camera's light meter is overwhelmed by all the reflected light and it's hard to get a camera-friendly composition when everything is white white white.


The first morning I woke up to snow everywhere, I grabbed some snaps of the view from my window:


And a few more from wandering around near my house (pictured in the first image) today:

It's colder than before
The seaons took all they had come for
Now winter dances here
It seems so fitting don't you think to dress the ground in white and grey...

My Beloved do you know
How many times I stared at clouds thinking that I saw you there?
These are feelings that do not pass so easily
I can't forget what we claimed as ours

Comments

[wychwood]

Oooh, lovely. Thank you for posting photos! :)

[redbird]

Thanks for the snow photos.

We haven't had 25 cm yet this season, in fact we haven't had a tenth of that by the official records (we did get 2 or 3 cm up at my end of the island, measured very unofficially by me after it had had a bit of time to melt and sublimate in the sun), which is a bit odd.

snoooow!

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I was doing the same today. We've just got about an inch (upstate NY in the States) and I remember most years of a couple or few feet. Which of course, I'd have normally complained about. I didn't realize until today how much I missed it. Also, we worry more than a bit about environmental things. Feels like real winter today.

Thanks for the photos!

Nyar and boo!

[ajollypyruvate]

Fog. Fog, I tell you!

Parts of California have been below -5*C for most of this month, though I've no idea how much snow has fallen in those areas. Wretched stuff!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Has the snow started to squeak underfoot yet ? i'm not sure when that transition starts, it's around -10 or a little under but it may well depend on size of snowflakes and so forth, but that's one of the ones I recognise - it pretty much works as "not just hat, but gloves, also fleecy pants". Then the next one is "inside of nose freezes when you inhale, which justifies a scarf around your face, and I haven't hit the "OK, go over to the gloves for really cold weather" transition yet this year - my fleecy gloves are warm enough that at -10 they are unwearable because my hands are too sweaty.

I have a nasty feeling the one below that is "Walk with your back to the wind, because if you walk into it your eyeballs will freeze", but even with windchill, it's not gone below -40 since I've been living here.

All the somatic stuff of learning to walk safely in these conditions is really hard to verbalise, and I suspect I'm a lot older than is optimal for getting confident about it rather than shuffling along as cautiously as someone twice my age. I just hope you manage to elude the joy of freezing rain, because when the ground's still well below freezing and the air isn't, so rain hits and freezes everywhere and then falls on top of that and, contrary to conventional physics, remains liquid over ice, that is spectacularly unpleasant, in a zero-friction sort of way. I'm sure you're being suitably careful, but I still worry a bit.

This seems to be the winteriest userpic I have to hand.

[darcydodo]

Snow!!

Can you believe there was actually a small snowfall in LA a week or so ago? It was pretty darn cold up here, too, but we didn't get snow. :(

[snjstar.livejournal.com]

There was snow in London last week!

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Is the Malloren frozen over? You should make a point of going to see it. Everyone walking over the ice... down by Ostermalm, round Strandvegen and Norrmalmstorg tends to be the best place to see it (and wherever it is across the lake from there.)

[ploni-bat-ploni.livejournal.com]

Pretty pretty pretty!

I find the snow-cold easier to deal with than the grey-cold. Atleast, with snow, the weather deserves to be cold! :-D I am actually quite enjoying this snow thing.

Your pictures are gorgeous... wow!

[owlfish]

You have REAL amounts of snow. Toronto had the cold, but not much snow. London has a little snow, but not the cold. It's lovely to see photos of what I grew up seeing winter as I felt it was supposed to be.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

:)) Thank you.

[dr-jen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing your snow, I've still not seen any in the flesh yet.