Nine To Five

Last night, I checked our trusty Weather Underground Astronomy page. To my delight, I read that the sun is now above the horizon in Fairbanks from 9am to 5pm, with a gain of about seven minutes every day. I had suspected as much. It is not quite as easy to sleep in now, as the sun hits our pillows earlier and earlier each morning. But I'm not complaining at all.

This weekend, Peter noticed the sun actually melting snow on the building where he works. We haven't seen the city without her white blanket since October and are forgetting what she looked like when we arrived at the tail end of summer. We are still not sure if the snow will melt in May or June. We were here in April three years ago, and there was still plenty on everything although the temperatures were above freezing. Barely.

One interesting side affect as been the loss of the Winter Wonderland quality of the landscape. For months, snow and ice were frozen on the trees around the cabin. The cold temperatures helped the ice hang on despite any wind, leaving the trees looking like something out of Narnia's eternal winter. Now that the sun is back, even though the thermometer is still pretty low, the snow has shaken loose from the trees and we are back to being surrounded by vital, green spruce forest. Green is a wonderful color in the midst of an icy winter.

Last fall, after the first freeze, I posted pictures of Peter's bare footprints in the frost on the porch on Solar Aperture. A few weeks ago, we swept some snow away to discover that one imprint of his foot in the frost was still there, held by the extreme cold for five months under the snow. I got a picture of it. I'm glad I did. As soon as the sun hit the porch the next week, the print was gone.

[click for larger image]