day: 3

woke up, ate corn pops (i accidentally poured orange juice in the first bowl, so i had to get another bowl...oopsie), and went to class at 9. i've also given up on my bangs--officially, they are the victim of bobby pins. it's nice to be able to see clearly now (cue: song by johnny nash). today in class we talked snow and how snowflakes form! here's their creation story: "once upon a time, there was a mass of warm, moist air. it was lonely, floating up in the big blue sky with no one to talk to, so it decided to collide with a cool, dry mass of air (get it? it collided with something "cool" so now it's "cool"?! ok. bad joke.). anyway, the combined masses cooled as they rose into the strato/troposphere. after cooling sufficiently, they were attacked by a mass of supercooled air that caused the clouds in the warm-cool mass to condense into water droplets! now, these water droplets weren't satisfied with simply being hydrogen bonded to each other--they wanted to move up in the world and become snowflakes, and associate with stuff on the ground! each water droplet then went on a mad search for (star)dust particles to use as a sort of 'nucleus', or foundation for crystal formation. all of the sudden, around -6 degrees celcius, they decided...to eat a norwegian bubble chocolate (i totally just had one--it was really delicious!). after devouring the chocolate, the droplet froze with sixfold-hexagonal symmetry around the (star)dust particle. the vapor around the frozen droplet then began to develop into beautiful patterns using faceting (condenses the flake edge into a plate) and branching (diffuses the vapor at the edge to make intricate point patterns)! because the super-cooled mass had different humidity levels--low and high--each snowflake formed at a different pace. the droplets in low humidity grew slowly and had simple prisms, and the droplets in high humidity grew the fastest and had complex prisms. after each snowflake thought itself to be adequately beautiful, they all floated down from the sky in a beautiful blizzard, shrouding earth and the island of misfit toys (shout-out to haley'bug! yay clay'mation rudolph!) in its glittery beauty, providing for pristine-looking landscapes and insulation (low thermal conductivity) for small and large animals--like, ermines and unicorns. the end." yup. so, that's the story of snowflakes. moving on. after learning about the properties of snow, etc., we did something with thermometers (i'm not really sure what...), ate lunch, and went skiing to the headwaters of the mississippi! we took the trail TO the headwaters (it was cool...small...like a 15 ft. spilling of water over a small 2 ft. high bump of ice. what it represents is what makes it super special awesome)...but, on the way BACK...we skiied across lake itasca. we followed a snowmobile track out to a little hut (about 100 ft. from shore) and then hit...SLUSH! SCARY! we all kind of panicked, but then barreled through some untouched snow (prodding it ahead of our skis with our poles to make sure it was ok) and approx. 2 miles later, after blazing our own trail, arrived back at the lab. EXHAUSTION. then, chilled for a while/drank some water before heading to class at 2 pm to do some work with measuring snow density. before dinner we played risk and then had 11 pizzas for dinner. then we played uno and mafia a couple of times, and then a couple of us read while the others finished risk/watched pokemon. tomorrow is supposed to be really windy and cold, so we're going to be inside learning about what animals do in the winter and tree identification with twig samples. for now, ciao! ps: thanks for commenting!! :)