Two posts today. I am rockin' the NaBloPoMo!
After seeing Norma's photo of wintry mix this morning, I checked my thermometer. Yikes! It's cold out there!
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I decided about six months ago that this thermometer reads a full 10º F. colder than actual. Be that as it may, it is still darned cold.
But the sun is shining, and really, it IS a beautiful day.
There was ice against the far shore on a couple mornings last week. The lake froze over completely on Friday, I think. On Sunday there was still no snow on the ice, and there was a fault line that ran diagonally all the way across the lake. Today there is no sign of it.
I was particularly taken with that curved pattern of snow on the ice.
No idea why the snow does what it does.
While I was outside taking these photos (and shivering; I had to use the tripod to avoid camera shake) I heard the strangest sound. If you turn up your speakers you can hear it, too. I think it must have been the ice groaning. It sounds like the wind in the video, but in real life the day was still so I know that wasn't it.
Perhaps it was the Abominable Snow Ice Man.
* * * * *
This is the first video I have ever uploaded to YouTube. Zounds! it was easy. The raw .avi file from my camera was 11.2 meg, way too big to expect anyone to download just to hear the ice groan. I tried to edit it in iMovie to compress it or maybe just to strip out the sound into a separate audio file, but three minutes of dinking around produced no results. Enough of that. I am all about the instant accomplishment.
Then I had a thought: Typepad automatically reduces the file size of photos (My originals are generally 900k-1mb in size; after I upload them they are more like 200k.) -- maybe YouTube automatically compresses video, too?
Yes, they do. I don't know what size my 11meg .avi file is now, but it downloads pretty quickly on my not-blazingly-fast DSL.
