Author: Sue Ahrendt

Wow, it really snowed last night…isn’t it wonderful?

Everything familiar was disappeared! The world looks brand-new.

A new year….a fresh clean start!

It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!

A day full of possibilities.

It’s a magical world Hobbes, ol’ buddy.

Let’s go exploring!

The Tuscarora Broomball rink is ready for action! We’ll provide the sticks. The only rule is: try really hard not to hit anybody in the face. Once last year, Nancy got hit in the lips with the ball. We were all very sorry and it looked very painful. And we tried very sympathetically not to laugh for the rest of the night (even though she looked like Charo) because it hurt her cracked fat lips to smile.

Come and join us please! We’re always up for a game.

Shelby and I snowshoed, the trail behind the canoe yard— up toward the spruce bog. We discovered all these these beautifully little feathery snowstructures-new to us. After dinner (with former staff Noah and Anna), we developed our own little wikipedia thesaurus for the formations. One of the definitions is correct, one partially correct, the rest are fiction.

Featherification: The residue of the ice particles within snowflakes creating a pattern also found in feathers. Cause of featherification is currently unknown.

Fleecite: Formations formed when the ice melts and the cold air comes descends from above forcing water droplets up and they freeze immediately

Flarcicle: Phenomenon occuring in the cold water in shallow areas of the lake where certain fish like to swarm, the crystallization forms from fish flatulence.

Hoarfrost formations: When the humidity is high, the morning cool weather causes the moisture to stick to everything and form ice crystals when it is damp out.

Advection frost refers to tiny ice spikes forming when there is a very cold wind blowing over surfaces. It looks like rimming the edge of flowers and leaves and usually it forms against the direction of the wind. It can occur at any hour of day and night.

Crystalized Feathercicles: The temperature of the water and the temperature of the air are in inverse relationship to each other, and on sunny winter days they reach the moisture in the air forms a conductor and freezes at the freezing point defined by that relationship. Open water is most common to the formation of crystal feathers.

Frostfeathers: The reverse process of honeycombed ice in which the water freezes slowly in hexoganal patterns. Happens when the air above is exactly the same temperature as the water below

Frice (Frosty ice): Heating and cooling of frost that covers the snow on top of ice. Creates a feather like crystal that “grows” when the sun is out.

Shelby and I went snowshoeing today, on the trail behind the canoe yard, up toward the spruce bog.

Tonight we grieved for Steve Posniak, the only human casualty of the Ham Lake Fire

Man accused of starting BWCA fire has killed himself

Associated Press
Last update: December 16, 2008 – 10:16 PM
An attorney for a Washington, D.C., man accused of starting a wildfire that charred 118 square miles in Minnesota and Canada last year said Tuesday that his client had committed suicide.
Mark Larsen said Tuesday that a relative of Stephen Posniak’s told him Posniak, 64, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Posniak was charged with allowing his campfire to burn out of control in May 2007. The fire spread in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Superior National Forest in Minnesota and into Ontario, destroying nearly 150 buildings worth more than $10 million.
Larsen says they felt Posniak, who pleaded not guilty last month, was overcharged in the case. The Minneapolis attorney said that he spoke to Posniak on Monday and that he was “acute in his thinking and quite pleasant over the phone.”