At the Ice Shove Café...

... you can talk all night.

That's Meade's photo, taken at sunrise. I wasn't there today. I slept until almost 7. Very strange for me! And now there's a blizzard warning:

So I'm not picturing us getting out there tomorrow morning. We shall see. My side of the bet is there will be no more than 10" of snow. It's the wind that makes it a blizzard, and 40 to 45 mph is a lot of wind. Still, that scary-sounding warning has me winning the bet. It says 5 to 10 inches of snow. A few days ago, they were saying 3 feet of snow.

It's been so windy.

We'd planned to stay in for the sunrise, but at the last minute, Meade decided to venture forth. He got this picture at 7:25 — 13 minutes after the official sunrise time:

The strong winds had already broken up the ice. Here's how it looked at 4:46 in the afternoon. This is my photograph, as you may be able to tell from the shadow in the lower left corner:

That's the familiar vantage point, and you can see the lake ice is gone except for the wall of ice blocks shoved up against the shore. That's a bit impervious to the brutal wind. I don't know how I made it all the way out there. It wasn't really cold, but oh! the wind.

Here's the video Meade made as I was standing there. Take note of the strong waves in the lake and the ring of fire:

Write about whatever you want in the comments. This is the overnight open thread.

Sunrise with ice shove — 7:26.

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Ice shove on Lake Mendota.

This morning at sunrise:

The word we were trying to remember is "seiche," but my research after the fact makes me think this was mostly the wind and not the sloshing seiche. 

Here's Meade's video of the invisible sunrise and me fulfilling the ritual of taking a picture of it:

Sunrise — 6:46, 7:11, 7:18.

We were out early — 33 minutes before sunrise — to see the city in nearly total darkness:

It looks peaceful from that distance, but there was plenty of rush hour traffic — all the people who start work at 7. Closer to dawn, I looked for a view facing east, but this view looking west was better:

The sign warns us not to stand on the edge of the cliff. It's not just that there are fools who fall of the edges of cliffs. They seem to be expecting this particular cliff edge to collapse from erosion. Imagine being the unlucky person standing there when the edge gives way. 

Meanwhile, also looking west, the sign says "no swimming," so no crunching through the ice:

Later, it was a sunny day — 50°. We had a nice second walk. And Meade made a nice video showing how the ice was piling up in little plates along the shore:

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Yummy Valentine's sunrise.

We were out in the sunrise, and so were the ice fishers:

Sunrise — 7:13.

That's my point of view, and here's Meade's:

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Sunrise — 7:00, 7:20, 7:33.

Cloudless, but somber.

The man-made clouds were picking up some sprightly pinkness...

Sunrise — 7:00, 7:10, 7:11, 7:12, 7:25, 7:27.

We walked out onto the ice today. I like to be able to do that, because you get a continual view of an unobstructed sunrise. I ran out ahead while Meade was holding still to do videos, seen here, and that's Meade in the distance in photo #3, with the waning gibbous moon. That's another moon view in photo #5.

 

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

I was listening to a "daylist" Spotify had made for me, and this line struck me: "When you get up in the mornin' and you see that crazy sun...."

Sunrise — 7:13.

The conversation continues into the night in this day without news.

"Greenland is not for sale and will not be for sale, so you can forget about your plans for Greenland to become part of the USA."

"Nothing about us without us, and Greenland’s future is solely up to us. A majority does not want to become Americans, we do not want to be taken over by another country...."

Said Aaja Chemnitz, "a Greenlandic politician serving in the Danish Parliament," quoted in "Trump appoints Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland/The Danish territory has long been in the president’s sights. Trump said the Republican governor “understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security" (WaPo).

From the text of the article: "Trump has said repeatedly that the United States will 'get' Greenland, casting it as a national security objective for the U.S. His administration also covets Greenland for its untapped rare earth metals, an industry dominated by China globally. In April, The Washington Post reported that the White House was preparing an estimate of what it would cost the federal government to control Greenland as a territory."

"How big is Greenland?" — that question came up in a novel I'm reading. A child asks the question of her father who was telling her a story about the Greenlandic ice sheet melting and flooding the world and had said "Imagine, a slab of ice the size of Greenland!" The father "had no idea," only that Greenland "was notorious for being smaller than it looked on a Mercator projection, but he felt sure it was large, given that its melting would cause global sea levels to rise by something like seven meters."

The WaPo article offers an answer to the question: Greenland is "around three times the size of Texas."

Sunrise — 7:01.

Both pictures were taken at the same time, the first one by me and the second one by Meade:

It's funny, when I saw the time stamp on Meade's, I thought the iPhone got the time wrong and wondered how. I'd only walked part way out, stopped for a photo, then retreated, because the path was atrocious, ruggedly bumpy with ice-slicked snow. Meade walked all the way out to the usual vantage point, and I was counting on him to get some later photos, closer to sunrise. What you see above is my favorite of the pictures he took. Because his picture is lighter and because I wanted a later photograph, I got sidetracked into puzzling over why the time stamp went bad. But that goes to show how thinking goes bad. There was one thing I didn't want to believe and it was the thing that was true: Meade and I snapped our pictures at exactly the same time. We were both standing in the same darkness, but he zoomed into the lit up spot on the distant shore. The iPhone adjusted the exposure.

Anyway, what wrong thinking and unexpected coincidence have you encountered lately?

Or... write about whatever you want.

Swans on the ice at sunrise.

This morning, at 7:26:

They don't seem to like standing on the ice — and there is open water close by — but there they stay, slipping about and shifting from one foot to the other.

This video is by me. You'll see Meade, at 0:40, making his own swan/sunrise video. Ah! Here it is:

And here's a still shot (by me) at 7:28, showing ice looking like broken plate glass piled up on the shore:

Sunrise — 6:51, 7:15.

Why not spend Saturday evening commenting right here in the blog café, where you can talk 'til dawn.

Sunrise — 7:07, 7:15, 7:23.

Write about whatever you want.

Icing up.

Video by Meade.

ADDED: More swans from Meade:

"He walked through the Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia... Later, he reached the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia — the midway point of his walk...."

"In the winter, he said, the strait does not entirely freeze over. 'It is this massive body of crushed ice and seawater…you’re literally climbing over the ice to make any short distance,' he said. He met a fellow adventurer in Alaska who traversed the strait with him. 'No one believed we were going to make it,' Bushby said. 'As it turned out, we managed to nail it on the first go, which no one expected, least of all us.' Once Bushby arrived in Russia, he hit another hurdle: he was detained for entering the country at an incorrect border. He spent 57 days in detention, he said, and faced a trial, until authorities agreed to let him continue his walk. 'It was just a whole series of miracles,' Bushby said...."

From "He set out to walk around the world. After 27 years, his quest is nearly over. Karl Bushby is expected to finish his globe-walking expedition by September 2026" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can see the photos, including Bushby immersed in Bering Strait ice).

At the Ice Bike Café...

... you can talk all night.

You have to look closely to see the 2 cyclists out on the lake ice. This isn't a sunrise picture. It was a bit too cold for us again. This is Lake Mendota at 2 in the afternoon.

Sunrise — 7:04, 7:17, 7:20, 7:24.

What's that thing in the ice? See "Man rescued after ATV breaks through ice on Lake Mendota." The man was rescued yesterday, but the ATV was still out there this morning, partly submerged in the ice.

Anyway, write about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

Icy lakeshore — afternoon.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.