I find this picture fascinating. Actually I find the original on my back porch fascinating. The heap of snow on the table shows something odd about how much frozen water fell from the sky. The table has a pyramid of snow that is around eight or nine inches deep some inches in from the edge. There’s a shallow slant to the pile and a hole in the middle where the table itself has space for an umbrella pole. The railings beyond the table, which we did not clear, have an inch of snow. What is going on?

There were two phases to the snowstorm we had. First, lovely fluffy snow drifted down. About four inches of it. Then frozen pellets, very round and smooth compared to normal sleet, fell. You could see the difference when the pellets began to fall. They were heavy enough to fall perfectly straightly. They compacted the snow below them as they piled up, or they fell through the fluff. Since the air was frigid there was no melting. However, look at the railings. Where four inches of snow originally had piled up, now they are nearly clear, completely unlike the table. And we didn’t do that.

Around here the upper air was warmer than the air near the ground. This isn’t quite right for sleet, which needs a cold layer above that warmer layer (though maybe it existed) or for hail, which needs water drops to be blown up and down between warm and cold. Whatever the atmospheric conditions were, they created these smooth pellets that could not simply pile up. They don’t stick to each other but roll around.

The table shows that the pellets had a shallow angle of repose.

The angle of repose is the steepest angle at which a sloped pile of granular material will remain stable without collapsing.

The pellets can’t pile up with straight sides, like the perpendicular cliffs at the edge of the table, crated by snowflakes. This is the key to the railings. The little ball-bearing ice-bits rolled off as they struck, and took the underlying snow with them. The table had a wide surface where the bits could pile up. Normally such a discrepancy would be caused by some sort of melting. That’s not going on here. It hasn’t gotten above freezing for days. Very inside baseball, but fascinating to me.

While we were stuck inside I wanted to make three-citrus marmalade but turns out I have no cheesecloth for containing the pulp, and not enough white sugar anyway. I’ve heard “interesting” things about using “organic” sugar, which we have plenty of, for jam-making. I’m going out today, so hopefully I’ll get another chance to make some jam! Instead, I spent a lot of time trying to analyze my life and my new story. I managed to divide my life activities into eight categories for the purposes of tracking and time management in my bullet journal. I also redid the opening scene in my new story.

One more snowy picture. It is Mount Monadnock but not from the current storm, which left more snow on the top of the mountain. Here’s a webcam with time lapse video from Sunday when the storm blotted out the mountain. https://franklinpierce.edu/webcam_monadnock/index.html