On Frost and Crows, Sublime

 During the recent stretch of very cold mornings, I usually walked to a coffee shop without camera, figuring I wouldn't see anything alive except for people driving.  That is not a photo subject that interests me.  But, as I walked by my garage, I was struck by the beauty of frost on the side of my garage.  Two different kinds of wood hosted different patterns of frost.  I vowed to get out the camera when I returned, hoping the frost wouldn't evaporate.  On very cold days, frost doesn't melt.  If the relative humidity is low enough, though, the frost will shrink and disappear.  It is changing from a solid to a vapor without melting or going through a liquid phase.  Technically, isn't called evaporation.  It's sublimation.  I'll never forget the first time I saw a pile of snow on a sidewalk shrink at a rate I could actually see without melting at all.  It was sublimating.  That was in Boulder, Colorado, where the winter air is often very dry.

 I knew that would happen to the frost on my garage today, so I got a couple of photos.  When I got back inside I took up my usual habit of etymology.  I thought about how psychologists use the word sublimate, especially Freud.  Then the root of the word, which has something to do with social status.  "below the lintel"  I invite you to search the word sublimate. 

A phenomenon related to frost is the formation of rime ice.  This is the formation of ice crystals on the windward sides of objects like rocks, metal poles, etc., when super-cooled fog clouds strike them.  The crystals literally grow from the substrate against the wind.  I say this happen ear the top of Lassen Peak one fall.  The linear crystals had grown six inches or more in length. With my gloved hand, I brushed a bunch of them off a rock, then watched as they grew back rather quickly.  There was a bitter cold and damp wind, not the kind of conditions that invite prolonged observation.  I love it when things like this happen in my yard or nearby so I can periodically run inside and stand by the wood stove.   I said I didn't expect to see anything alive on my first walk, but later I noticed a healthy crop of mildew growing among the frost crystals, especially noticeable in the top photo.

 Here's a shot of nature creating a snow man.  Three stacked Douglas-fir rounds of decreasing size, covered by the last snow storm, resemble a snowman under construction. 

While photographing this monument, I heard Stellar's Jays and some tiny little brown birds that I can't identify by sound.  Thought back about the crows I saw outside the coffee shop.  They were perched on separate light poles 50 to 100 feet apart.  Seemed to be having an intense conversation, possibly about where their next meal might be found.  It was music to me.  Sublime.

Another natural phenomenon I discovered a few years ago, after struggling with keeping sidewalks clear with only a shovel.  When we get a big snowfall, we generally just walk through the snow to get to a car, and after a few trips the snow gets so packed and refrozen that it's nearly impossible to shovel.  I discovered that if I shovel the loose snow on either side of the packed-down strip, the exposed concrete absorbs enough UV light and converting it to infra-red that heat is conducted to and under the snow.  After an hour or so, I can usually come back and shovel the formerly rock-solid strip.  This process works even better on our deck which is a darker color and absorbs even more UV.
My regular viewers have probably noticed, I cannot shovel snow or split firewood for very long without thinking about all sorts of stuff other than what I am doing.  If I paid more attention to shoveling and chopping, I probably wouldn't have a blog.