snow

It snowed most of the day today.  Hard at times (nothing like DC I’m sure).  I know that no 2 snowflakes are alike, but they were VERY different throughout the day today.  In the morning they were coming down hard and fast in little snow pellets.  Then later they were soft and fluffy and enormous, maybe the biggest snow flakes I’ve ever seen.  Now they are tiny and hardly coming down at all.  A little bit of everything.  But, and this may come as a surprise to most of you, they simply aren’t sticking to the ground.  I don’t understand the science of that since the temperature today hovered in the low 20s…

That reminds me that I need to address the Christmas decorations picture from the other day.  From all the comments I got (not necessarily on the blog), the brown ground came as a surprise to a lot of people.  So it’s not just white here all the time.  Sure, on the annual sea ice or the Ross Ice Shelf, those stay white all the time.  And the glacier right behind us is always white and covered in snow/ice.  And the mountains and volcanoes are covered in a bunch of snow.  But the town itself is kind of how I would imagine a mining town.  There is a ton of volcanic rocks in various sizes.  It looks like mud a lot of the time (my supervisor dubbed it McMUDo), but it is actually volcanic dust.  When the snow is melting it’s really muddy and when it hasn’t snowed for a while it is very dry and dusty.  And the dirt/dust gets everywhere, it is filthy.

I haven’t been up to a whole lot lately.  Kind of boring actually.  But we get an entire 2 days off for Christmas (Friday and Saturday), so that will be nice, kind of.