Winter With A Vengeance

Take a look at winter - the only thing that's missing are some mountains and a glacier!

While it's quite snowy and cold here, it's not nearly as crazy as it is in some other places in the country - so I salute all those Americans (and, well, all those Europeans and Scandinavians and Asians, etc., too) who get out there and shovel snow and take care of animals and help their neighbors and go to work and deliver the mail and make dinner and run errands and do all those things that still have to be taken care of even when there are several feet of snow to get through - THANK YOU!

so enough about snow this week - soon it will be a distant memory...

in the meantime, visit this web site to learn about Wilson Bentley (a.k.a. "The Snowflake Man" 1865 - 1931), who discovered that no two snowflakes are the same.

http://snowflakebentley.com/index.htm

Using his mother's microscope, this native Vermonter began studying snowflakes at a young age and learned the difficult art of photography just so he could photograph them. Here's some of what you'll read:

HE WAS KNOWN TO THOUSANDS around the world as the Snowflake Man. His researches into the mysteries of rain and snow were discussed in over 100 newspaper and magazine articles, in 10 technical articles in the Monthly Weather Review, and in his book 'Snow Crystals." His painstaking work, carried out entirely by himself on his small Jericho farm, was so thorough and gave such new insights into the formation of precipitation that he deserves the title of America's First Cloud Physicist.
The Bentley homestead was in a valley on the east end of Jericho snuggled up at the base of Bolton Mountain. The country winters were long and hard, and in those days attendance at the one-room schoolhouse was very infrequent. Perhaps it was because of this that Bentley obtained his lifelong passion to study and understand water in all of its forms-dew, frost, clouds, rain, and especially snow in the form of ice crystals. At the age of 60 he recalled those early days:
"I never went to school until I was fourteen years old. My mother taught me at home. She had been a school-teacher before she married my father, and she instilled in me her love of knowledge and of the finer things of life. She had books, including a set of encyclopedia. I read them all.
"And it was my mother that made it possible for me, at fifteen, to begin the work to which I have devoted my life. She had a small microscope which she had used in her school teaching. When the other boys of my age were playing with popguns and sling-shots, I was absorbed in studying things under this microscope: drops of water, tiny fragments of stone, a feather dropped from a bird's wing, a delicately veined petal from some flower.
"But always, from the very beginning, it was snowflakes that fascinated me most. The farm folks, up in this north country, dread the winter; but I was supremely happy, from the day of the first snowfall - which usually came in November - until the last one, which sometimes came as late as May."