Thursday, June 10, 2010

Cold weather is for the birds!

It was Grocery Shop Day today...I genuinely look forward to doing the fortnightly shopping. Part of the fun is to see how many legitimate products I can buy on special, and part is to see how little I can spend. Today I did not achieve highly in my personal challenge but it was good anyway. When I got home a package was waiting for me, which had travelled from Pennsylvania in the States all the way here: a birthday present of a hand-crafted polymer clay bracelet and kimono hairclips from my friend Genevieve. What a beautiful surprise! Genevieve is a trained silversmith who has extended her skillset into the polymer arts as well with great success.We heard somewhere that the temperature was supposed to drop to -4 this morning. We were not surprised - yesterday and today have been the coldest we've experienced so far. Apparently this is fairly typical Timaru weather - clear blue skies with frosts overnight. In the morning the ground is covered in tiny shiny crystals, treacherous on our wooden deck if you're unaware! We were amazed to even find an icicle growing in a plastic lid in the back yard. Its formation sparked some debate...how ever did it grow diagonally upwards like that? The birds are bright and chirpy in the crisp early mornings as I discovered yesterday morning when examining the frost. They do not seem bothered by the cold - so wonderfully has God designed them that they can fluff up to three times their size (or so it seems on this model) and insulate themselves with air!

1 comment:

Hazel Beckett said...

I love the photo of your frosted window. It reminds me of the mornings in Joburg, when the car windscreens were all iced up, and we had to pour hot water over them to melt the frost so that we could see.