Scenes from the Yard

See the stick in the lower right hand quadrant of this photo?  It marks where my snowboard used to be.  With the high winds we've experienced in the last couple of weeks, it must have blown away.  I'll have to stop by the arts and crafts store today and pick up another (sturdier?) snowboard.

Thanks to all of the wind, there are a lot of twigs down across the yard.

The wind was strong enough to fell some larger branches, too!

I strolled down to the dock to take a gander at the creek.  The ice is thicker than yesterday, and it extends farther out into the creek.  There's still a parade of small ice floes.  I'm not sure where they come from, but I did see one bob to the surface.

The fringe of the ice looks like a series of waves has passed over it, but I think the reality is more likely that the ice accumulates underneath the surface, and that these rifts are due to wave action from below.

Yesterday, the branches of this tree reached down to the water surface, where they were holding onto small bergs of ice.  It looks as though the branches were snapped off sometime in the last 24 hours.  Also, notice how the thin ice floes on the surface of the creek tend to move right along the icy edge as they pass through the bend near the dock.  The middle of the creek is ice-free in the photo above.

Looking across the creek, the fringe ice has extended on that side, as well, and there is a series of rifts in the ice near the water's edge.

See how much thicker the ice has gotten?  I don't think it's anywhere near thick enough to stand on.  Also, notice the wave-like rifts near the water's edge.

We had a very hard freeze a couple of weeks ago, when temperatures struggled to get out of the teens.  We spent the better part of a week in single-digit temperatures, and at night below-zero temps were common.  The creek froze solid (I'll have pictures in the coming week), and the dock was literally bent out of shape because the water was running high at the time.  In the photo above, you can see how the corner of the dock at the upper right was warped.  The dock is still stable, and I don't think this will have any long-term ramifications for my ability to use it.