forty-third verse, same as the first

[mrissa]

I have more steady minutes per hour than I did yesterday. Sadly, it's still not anything like 100%.

The stuff in need of doing is not decreasing, for some strange reason. Items are not magically removing themselves from my to-do list.

Tell me about ice.

Edited to add: If you're going to post without an lj, especially if you're going to post links, please sign your post or at least indicate what it is that you're linking to and why you're linking to it here and not somewhere else. Otherwise I may delete your comment as comment spam, and then everybody will miss whatever frightfully clever link it was.

Comments

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Ice, ice, baby,
too cold, too cold,
the baddest girls around
are in the BLUE and GOLD!

[with apologies for 1980's slang]

[timprov.livejournal.com]

In the Carter Hall case it really ought to be "are in maroon and gold."

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

At Pennsic, it is about half a mile from the campstore, where they sell the big bags of ice, to my camp, where my cooler languishes in need of ice.

On a very hot day, it is a great pleasure to go buy the ice -- to reach my whole upper body into the big ice freezer, hesitating for just a moment longer thatn necessary just to enjoy it; to pay for my ice and then walk back to camp, balancing the ice on top of my head so that it melts and drips down my neck, taking it down occasionally to avoid brain freeze. I might lose half a pound of ice in the process of walking it home, but it's worth it.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

About ten years ago, I went to visit Jan's preschool classroom. It happened to be recess.

I was very awkward with children and didn't know what to say to them. A girl named Sierra or Sienna and a few other kids were all surrounding a puddle that had frozen solid overnight. They were pressing on it and smoothing their hands over it.

"Wow!" I said in my best Scientific Discoverer Voice. "That water sure did turn hard and cold, didn't it?"

Sierra or Sienna looked up at me in pure disgust.

"That's why they call it ice," she said.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience when I was teaching first grade Sunday School when I was a senior in high school. We were supposed to be practicing for the Christmas program, but none of the bigger kids had shown up yet, so the program director and I were standing around the sanctuary with my six-year-olds. The kids found pinecones under one of the pews. "Now why would there be pinecones in a church?" said my favorite, Mal, thoughtfully.

"The mystery of the pinecones!" said the program director in a shiny happy voice. "Why would there be pinecones in a church? Let's brainstorm!"

Mal looked at her in disgust and enunciated very carefully: "Some-body brought them in."

Ice

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

It's very very cold. Except when it isn't.

Thank you! I'll be here all week.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I like ice a lot. I like ice in my drinks, I like the sight of ice outside, I like the feeling of ice melting on my skin (if I'm expecting it.) At my house we joke that I would like a glass of wet ice, instead of ice water.

At the same time I dread ice cover outside. I inevitably fall at least once every winter, and sometimes I can feel that sprain or headache or ripped patch in my pants just looking at it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And you fall without having to shovel our driveway.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would need to be belayed in order to shovel your driveway.

Though hopefully once my upper body isn't quite so much too large for my hips I will get some of my old grace back.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I find that on our driveway, grace means that people look more beautiful while spraining their wrists. Or just their dignity.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Some afternoons, after a particularly cold morning following a wet night, you can find ice fossils slipping off autumn leaves.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

They sell dry ice at the Hy-Vee here. Every time I walk past the cooler, I look forward to the summer, specifically the fourth of July and dry ice bombs. I'm working out a way to set off at least one without getting in trouble or ruining anyone's day. This may require a roadtrip or something.

My Brita pitcher actually does make clearer ice than tap water. The ice is clear-clear and looks fake because I'm used to cloudy white-grey fridge ice or crushed-crystally ice, not smooth, even, wet clarity. At the center of each cube, there's a white crystalline cloud, and I can't tell if that's where all the clarity collides with itself or some other thing.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that between wind and ice, you seem to be in a northerly mood, but I think that may be a tautology for you.

I was also going to quote what C.S. Lewis said about reading the line, "Baldur the beautiful is dead, is dead! and about "northernness", but couldn't find it online and don't have the book (Surprised by Joy, I think.)

The first time I was in Houston for a job interview, they'd just had a big ice storm. I'm sure it had been dangerous, but when I got there all the ice on the streets was gone. What I saw was the ice melting off trees and roofs and everything else; in one place, I saw a stop sign with a perfect octagonal ice sheet that had slipped halfway off it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was born in a northerly mood, yes.

For me the line that got me as a little kid that still gets me is, "Men die, cattle die, even the gods themselves must one day die." It goes on to be an aphorism about reputation -- and important, too, in the context of Norse societies -- but it stopped me like a door being blown shut.

But then, Baldur and I never got along much. I'd rather have any of the others, really.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

There was an ice storm the day we moved into our house (end of March/ beginning of April, lo these many moons ago). The trees were very pretty, except for the one that crashed onto the garage of the rental place and shattered frozen twigs all over the driveway, which then proceeded to freeze to the driveway overnight, since it was still raining and freezing. It was not a surface you could walk on easily, let alone carry heavy object across.

I thought I had a picture to link to from our gallery, of the pretty ice. Apparently not.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

With the right kind of scotch, it will already taste like mildew, and so you don't have a problem.

In more seriousness, why not splurge on a bag of ice?

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

We do -- regularly. Seems to destroy the purpose of having an automatic ice-maker, though.

[carbonel]

Why would you want to put ice in a lovely single malt? All it needs is a glass.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I play ice, as a musical instrument. Or, to be perfectly honest, I want to play ice. This was done on the Steve Allen Show many years ago, and it looked great. Ice has more sounds than a dumbek, with slapping and bonking and chipping and splashing and more! At the time, I was into bongos, and wanted to expand my percussion repertoire. Even just water would be an aural treat (though not for use around electric instruments).

The closest I've actually come is bringing an ice cube tray release as a sound effect. You know, the part in the tray that makes the cubes with a lever that pops them out (in theory). It makes a unique clanking sound. At least, the metal ones do. Sadly, they don't (commonly) make them anymore; plastic trays are cheaper and more effective. But sometimes, I miss the old ones.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They made ice trays out of metal? Youch. I suppose it would have to have a lever, because firm grabbing and twisting a bit of frozen metal would hurt.

(I was reading one of MacDonald's McGee mysteries earlier this summer when I went down to my parents' house and earnestly inquired of my mother: did she know that they used to sell beer in cans that you had to open with a can opener? She may still be laughing at me over this. If I call to tell her about the ice trays, she will probably bring up the beer cans again. And laugh some more.)

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I forgot my other ice moment. I decided to walk to work on the coldest day Minnesota had had in a long time -- it was 30 below. I have no idea what the windchill was. I figured it was better to really suit up and walk for twenty minutes than to stand and wait for a bus for fifteen minutes.

So I dressed so warmly that I was uncomfortably hot and sweaty by the time I hit Nicollet Mall. This poor AP photographer came up to me, camera in his frozen fingers. He asked if he could take my picture. I said, um okay because I thought it would be so incredibly stupid: a random person in a ski mask and snowpants. He took the photo and hightailed it back to his car.

I looked at my reflection in the Dayton's window afterward. My entire nose and mouth and each eyelash was covered with brilliant, sparkling ice. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Ice holds things. It comes in layers and sheets, even when it looks clear and solid to a glance. Whatever touches it, as it's freezing, it holds and covers and preserves. For a time, an outsider can see the thing; then, as the ice grows up around it, it becomes the ice's secret. Ice holds memories: the imprint and track of what touched it as it was freezing, but more. It holds the temperature, the nature of the day, the quality of the water which formed it, the shape of the sky under which if froze. It is a perfect, transparent, indecipherable record of the moment in which it froze. Even in an icecube tray in a freezer, each piece of ice is different and full of memory.

When it melts it returns the memories, but by then the moment has past and almost always there is no one there to receive what the ice gives up.

[pameladean]

The winter that we moved into this house, there was an ice storm. It was not overall a pleasant thing. People fell and broke bones; cars skidded and crashed; the company that was supposed to come and refinish our floors could not get out of any of its driveways, which in the long run necessitated our moving everything in the entire downstairs three separate times.

But the immediate effect, if you walked out onto the porch, was amazing. You know the drill, with the fairyland tracery all over everything, every single mundane object, including discarded styrofoam cups and random plastic bags, decorated with all the cliches, spun sugar, pure white and pure translucent lace and crystal. But there had been so much moisture that the underlying objects were not just decorated, they were made larger -- thicker, taller, wider. The contrast between this enlargement and the extreme delicacy of the outmost adornment was enthralling.

P.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

The scene in the movie "Legend" where Jack dives underwater and it suddenly freezes, trapping him beneath the ice, frightened me an unreasonable amount; everytime someone mentions that Minnesota weather can sometimes change very quickly and the temperature can go from warm to freezing in the same day, I think of this scene and the ice forming so fast on the lake, and it is one thing that keeps me from swimming in the lakes around here! (Another thing: big fish with spiky teeth, but you didn't ask about that. You asked us to tell you about ice.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is extremely unlikely that you would have a problem with this in lakes. Your presence splashing around would continue disturbing the top of the lake so that even forming a thin film of ice would be incredibly difficult, much less a thick enough layer that you would have difficulty breaking through. (Unless you can hold your breath for weeks.) People who do the Polar Bear Swim don't get frozen under the ice, and I imagine you wouldn't go when it was even nearly that cold. You would be much more likely to get chilled from the water and air temperature if it started getting that cold, and to want to get out long, long before anything started to freeze.

Also, most of the lakes where you might want to swim are too small and/or too populated by humans to have spiky-toothed fish. Snapping turtles, possibly (although, again, if you go where there are lots of humans, the turtles are likely to go somewhere else). But spiky-toothed fish, no, not so much. There are Northerns, but if they bite you, it feels like your kid pinched you under the water -- a brief "ow!" and on you go with your life.

If you're uncomfortable doing it, of course you don't have to do it. But the ice and fish scenarios are really, really, really unlikely.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Well it's quite a relief to know all of that! I did suspect it was an unreasonable fear, though, and I'm glad it wasn't warranted. But everytime I see the scene in Legend I'll probably still have to hold my breath until Jack pops through the ice.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sure, scenes like that are effective because they tap into worries/fears, not because they're scientifically plausible.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Ice? I live in the Red River Valley.

As you probably know, this is the domain of the Snow Demons. Ice is something that we are very familiar with here.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So you decided not to tell me anything about it out of spite, then, rather than unfamiliarity?

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Nah, I figured you already knew about it. :-) But okay.

Didya know that it's possible to drive a car that has half an inch of ice coating it, if you just get certain areas clear? I did this once after an ice storm. The windshield was clear, and so were the windows, but I had slabs of ice on the sides of my car. When they came off a few days later, it was in huge sheets. Quite a sight, really.

Another thing about ice: cats trying to walk on it look very silly.