Amazing! - UPDATE

Picture by Juliefainart. I really feel like I'm in fairyland tonight, so this was really the best picture.

I really can't believe this. It happened again, (twice in one week???? But it NEVER happens!!!) only it's more amazing, and I've seen something I don't really remember ever seeing before.

We got a nice dusting of snow today, maybe an inch or half inch. Sure enough, it was the separate, snowflake-shaped, individual crystals yet again, only with a little accumulation, and it never changed into something else, as I thought it would. So I'm getting out of the car after work, and the streetlight shows me the ground cover, and I had to lean down and get a better look at it. I swear I was looking at pure, sparkling diamonds strewn across the ground. Thankfully it's not one of those orange lights, but had a nice blue tint to it, a little closer to moonlight. There is moonlight too, but it's not full, unfortunately, so not quite bright enough to have the same effect. It was bizarrely dazzling.

Called my daughter to come look at it with me, and we both looked for a minute, rather stunned. Can anything outside of the bottom of a 7th grade girl's locker be THAT sparkly? I realize sparkles are out of favor in graphics, but surely it is all right when they just drop out of the sky and surprise you.

I said, again, "This doesn't happen all the time!" As a matter of fact I don't remember ever seeing anything quite like this. She picked up a small handful, and it looked like she was literally holding a handful of diamonds in the light. I ran out back to see it in just moonlight; but not quite bright enough to do the same thing. Then brought a handful in to look at under the light, and whoah! You could still see all the individual snowflakes! THAT'S why all the endless sea of tiny little dazzling sparks! It's reflecting on countless tiny surfaces of pure crystal! Wooooot!!!!

The above is made with polymers, but that's what it looks like for REAL. Only better.

I want to keep bringing handfuls in and looking at the sparkling, and at all the individual flakes that have not compressed, but it almost feels like I'm killing them as they melt. So then I had to quickly eat it so as not to waste them or feel like I'm hurting them or something hehe.

Thankfully it is absolutely bitterly cold, so those little guys aren't going anywhere for the rest of this night. I'm sure to be going back out a few times to marvel at this one. What a rare gift to receive twice. Maybe I just got a little wink from the heavens for appreciating it last time and not being able to share it. Isn't that a nice thought?

This? Not quite as pretty as what I'm seeing. But it'll last longer.

Of course if I was insane I might think it's a conspiracy. Like the aerosol rainbows near the ground - below:

Update!! I went out in the morning, and thankfully our absolutely frigid temps have held steady below 15. FULL SUN but only 15 degrees!

So I looked on the ground, and not only was it sparkling like a full load of diamond dust, it was OF COURSE reflecting the colors as well (something I hadn't foreseen!!) My entire lawn was made up of COUNTLESS, blinding, colors. Each spark was a color - deep blue, deep red, deep green, deep orange - but they were all put together in a BLANKET of FIRE. Blue, red, green, purple fire, all staring up at me from the cold cold ground. Again, you do not see this every day. Normally the sun equals melting. I'm dumbfounded. More!!!! More!!!

completely different phenomenon. Just one of those things. It doesn't sparkle even a little bit.

Stop and See the Snowflakes

Lucy of the Peanuts wouldn't eat snowflakes until January. They weren't ripe yet.

Today I had to work OT, and there were just a few tiny flakes falling down, not enough to wet the ground or be even barely visible. This lasted a few hours. Twice I went outside and twice I watched the snowflakes land in the dark faux fur on my coat and each one was an individual, each one was perfectly shaped, though they were all different. They looked much like the ones above - they all had six sides, but some were intricate and some were flatter and more platelike. They were all amazingly beautiful.

The first time, I went back in and tried to call my family to tell them to go outside. No answer. The second time, I got no answer again so I told my co-worker to take a quick walk out the door and see what I had seen. Before I could finish my sentence, she cut me off yelling "OMG SNOW! I have to drive home in this, oh SHIT." I had already explained that there was nothing happening - that kind of snow melts a moment after it lands, and it is all separate, tiny, floating things. Not the driving crystals associated with slippery roads or, if you're like me, snowmobiling. So I called my boss on the other side. I told her the same thing, and she laughed in my ear. At me. She had no intention of going out.

I told five people in all, one of whom was outside WITH me and had one on his arm that we both looked at, and not a single one was interested. Snow like that doesn't happen every day. In fact, here, we don't get it but once every several years, if that.

What the hell happens to people? I know it's not "growing up" because I'm grown up. I know it's not just working because my husband would have been interested, and he has worked his whole adult life.

Do they all just lose their sense of wonder? Do they ever, like me, just go out in the rain and take their shoes off and splash in the puddles?

More importantly, if I had said this to YOU and you were with me, would you have looked and marveled at the snowflakes? Would you have wondered at their beauty? Would you have laughed at me? Would you have panicked? Do you still have your sense of wonder and beauty in the little things that happen around you when you're lucky? Please, tell me these answers. I am not being flowery or rhetorical. What would you do, and what do you do? With things like this?

Best Christmas Potion Ever

It's all here. Of course look at the home page, the faq, et. al. but the demonstration is really good. This stuff hasn't been legal in the US for nigh about a hundred years; get while the gettin's good. I wish I'd seen the demo before I tried the stuff, because then I'd have known that only lunatics drink it straight. Live and learn. If I could afford to drink expensive hooch, I'd drink this anytime I was ever going to drink. It's like liquid magic mushrooms or something. Except you get drunk. Happily. And then go sleepy. And dream of hundreds of little creatures like these:

Enjoy!

Guinea Piggin'

What guinea pigs would sing, if they could.

They're smart.

And cute.

Giving Thanks for the Free Market

It's been exciting seeing how much press the real story of Thanksgiving has been getting this year - even in the L.A. Times children's section, the story is being told. Rush Limbaugh tells it every year. Sandy is telling it at JFS. It's also found here.

Long story short - the Pilgrims farmed communally in Plymouth, and the results of their labors were put into a communal store from which everyone was free to take what he wanted. Predictably, there was very little produced, so little that the people were starving and freezing and dying to death. They were selling the few possessions they had to the Indians just to survive. That's what communism does. They thought Plato had it right.

Then the governor said "We're dying - time to try something new." So each family was allotted a plot, and anything they produced on that plot was theirs to eat or sell. All of a sudden people who couldn't work before found the strength to do so. They produced such abundance that there was plenty for the coming winter, plenty to sow the following spring, and plenty to have a ginormous feast and invite the local Indians to partake of it with them, as they gave thanks to God for the free market, which had made this all possible.

This is how it always works - I will never understand why so many people are eager to implement socialism when all it spells is death, hunger, and destruction of the very people they claim need help - to hear someone like McEwan saying how Obama ought to just implement a "proper socialist system" - you have only a couple options there. They're either lazy, stupid, ignorant, or evil - or some combination of those. There are precious few other possibilities, because it's well known, there really is no excuse for ignorance of what communism does, and there is really very little excuse for ignorance of what the free market does. (I don't mean phony companies insulated from the actual MARKET because they're backed by the government; those don't even count ) and while I realize some people might have gotten confused because Alan Greenspan seems to have turned his back on the truth and reality of economics (and that Keynesian shithead ended up winning the Nobel for his cycle theory LOL ) I can give people a LITTLE leeway for ignorance on what free markets actually do. A little. But they get no pass for pretending communism isn't what it is - like I say, that leaves such people either lazy, stupid, ignorant, evil or some combination thereof. Of course I tend towards "evil" but I'm a cynic.

But this year, don't forget to thank the existence of free trade for the abundance on your table. Unless you're a congressman/senator, and then you ought to thank those of us who worked hard all year so you didn't have to and could just take it from us.