Icicles and a Another Drawing

Went out this morning and took some pictures of the icicles around our place. We rarely get these, even if it snows, but it's been so cold lately, that we now have quite a collection.

Here are a few of the formations hanging off the undercarriage of my husband's truck.

  

Here is one hanging off the eves of our house, right as you come up the steps to the front deck. I just hope no one is standing under it when it lets go! But I don't have the heart to knock it down. I want to see how much longer it will get. Right now it's at about two feet.

Then there is the ice out at the barn. This has become a real problem, as the water buckets in the stalls, and the troughs out in the pastures freeze over. Currently, three times a day and sometimes four, we are having to carry warm water out to the barn in a Sparklets bottle to fill the stall buckets. We recently had to give up on the pasture troughs. They are so packed with ice we can't use them, and have no way to get warm water out to them. And tonight "they" tell us it may get down as low as 10 degrees.

And, since it's too cold and icy to be outside much, I did another drawing, trying to keep to my promise to myself that I would draw as often as possible. For this one, I used a photo from a magazine for the pose.

And, that's it in the land of the frozen! Hope we get a thaw soon, 'cause I'm getting really tired of toting gallons of warm water out to the barn.

Pogonip...Yes it really is a word.

For the last week our place has been frozen over. Frozen pond, frozen hoses, plants buried under patches of frozen snow, frozen water buckets in the horse stalls. This time of year that's pretty par for the course, except for the frozen snow. We rarely have snow last more than a day or two, but this year it was heavy, and lingered for weeks. However, pogonip was a whole new deal. Apparently it is a Shoshone word meaning "cloud." It is caused by fine ice crystals suspended in the air, and occurs rarely during cold winter spells. Old settlers referred to it as The White Death because they thought the crystals got into your lungs and could kill you. We have had frost at our place every year, but nothing like this. It was beautiful and weird, coating everything in lethal looking ice-spikes. It made our hot-wire pasture enclosures look like barbed wire. Here are some of the photos I took around our place, showing the effects of pogonip.