Ragged Snow

January 11, 2009.   Monday.

Situation:  Work today, get home just before 3.  Moi is at the kitchen table, and Mway greets me at the door.  I decide to take her for a walk right away, without putting on my walking clothes, so I suit up right then and there.  Mway starts pacing, circling the kitchen table, huffs of excitement growing louder and louder.   Eventually she makes a weird, squeaky half-gulping, half-yawning sound.  “You trying to say something Mway?”  Moi teases.

State of the Path:   The snow is completely gone beneath the big spruce tree behind our house.  In the back yard and elsewhere, it is ragged with foot and paw prints and exposed dirt and grass.  On much of the path, the snow is half-gone, so you have a strip of slick snow on one side, grass and dirt on the other.  Some places, such as underneath the small pin oaks before the creek, the snow is gone altogether; other places, such as along the ridge to bug land, the snow is still there, and still slippery.

State of the Creek:  Most of the creek has iced up, even in the shallow rocky areas.  The ice in the deep parts is either gray or transparent with brown water showing underneath.  I can’t break it with my walking stick.  In the rocky areas, the ice is thin; you can see a number of air bubbles sliding along under the ice, and if you listen closely you can hear the water gurgling in those spots.   I hear birds -- sparrows? -- chirping down by the creek, and see a few fly overhead.

The Fetch:   Again, today, up at the clearing, much of which does not have much snow on it today, Mway only fetches the stick two times.   As I said before, this is no skin off my nose, but I do wonder what’s up with her.