Abominabald Snowman

It's currently seven degrees Fahrenheit (almost -14 Celsius) out, and strong winds are blowing the snow into drifts about a foot deep. It's not pleasant out, but it looks pretty- I particularly love the patterns in the iced-over surface of the body of water on site:

The cliche is that the site looks like a scene from a Currier and Ives lithograph... in fact, Currier and Ives printed a lithograph of the site I am working at, and a couple of another of our sites. Of course, it's impossible to dig up any 19th Century American artifacts without finding a nasty underbelly... so, Currier and Ives fans, prepare to be shocked and appalled. Yeah, nasty, aren't they? They are a far cry from the saccharine winter scenes and stirring depictions of historical events.

Sorry about that jarring interlude, but I felt I had to drag that unpleasantness into the light of day. Getting back to the body of the post, around 5AM, I took a picture of myself bundled up before heading out for a half-hour site inspection tour (though it was hard to see anything in the near whiteout conditions).

That snow ninja! I pretty much covered up from head to toe- layering a moisture-wicking thermal undershirt, a long-sleeved waffle-weave T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a button-down flannel, and a hoodie, topping it all off with a nylon windbreaker to keep an excessive amount of snow from soaking into my ensemble. Yeah, I was pretty much ready for anything Old Man Winter or, if you prefer, the Cailleach could throw at me. If the getup sounds a bit much, I have to note that the heat is set low during the night, high enough to keep the pipes from bursting, but not much hotter. Stuffing Ginger down my shirt was not an option, at least not a sound one.

Right now, the snow is still falling, but the fine powder that had already fallen is being whipped up by the wind, so it's hard to tell the provenance of any one flake. Today, I'm the only flake I can be sure of.