Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Snow in March? A Cooling Treat for July!

Something to help cool everyone off this hot July

I thought I would post some images that I've been remiss in posting over the past year or so. We had a special treat this year - on March 1st Mother Nature provided us with an unusual, heavy snowfall (I know you northerners will look at this and wave it off as nothing, but for Atlanta, especially in the spring, this is very unusual). I don't remember anything like this in previous years - when we first moved to Northcrest in 1998 (at 3401 Thornewood Dr) we got hit by an Ice Storm late in the year - I don't remember what year exactly but around 1999 give or take. That one was bad due to all the rain we got for about the month prior - then the ice hit, expanding all the wet pines. My next door neighbor at the time was from Mobile and he had never seen anything like it - he was out on the back deck when a limb came crashing down to break his collar bone. In any case, this "snowstorm" started out as a light snow - unusual in March, so I took some snaps. These images are from about 2:00 PM - and I'm showing them progressively so you'll see it started to get heavy:











The next set I took between 2:30 and 2:40 - it really started to come down and was sticking good at this point - you can see the accumulation on our patio furniture. The flakes were gigantic and fantastic to behold...



















The next photos were taken a bit later - between 6PM and 6:30PM (note the state of the full-bloom camilias - they look like giant octopoda!) - we decided to get out in it. By then the temperature came up a bit so the snow was getting really slushy and it's starting to melt on the streets - it was interesting walking beneath the trees - stuff was falling hard and it really pelted the hoods of our jackets.































That snowman ended up lasting a couple of days - sort of a reminder of what once was...

-- John