With the way the snow fell yesterday, fast and damp and with everything already soaked, it never quite reached the ground, and now as it's melting down it's just leaving droplets and clusters of clear ice over the tips of the grass and nestled among the leaves of the herbs. When the sun comes out for a few minutes it's absolutely beautiful, like tiny diamond flowers on all the plants. I like to think it's what simbelmynë would look like, if simbelmynë were real. And the way everything froze over so fast, there's ice sheets in places I've never noticed them before. There's a few places on the mall, where thick sheets of ice had frozen over mud puddles, and then the water at the bottom soaked into the ground, so the ice sheets are just floating on the grass. And some of the semi-permanent puddles froze really fast in a texture that almost looks like widmanstätten iron, except with concentric rings superimposed where they hadn't entirely melted-- at least, I think that's why; I wish I knew enough to be sure.

*That* sort of wonder is why I decided to study geology in the first place. Why oh why did I let stressing over classes make me forget?

And speaking of classes, we talked about waves and wave theory today in Earth Cycles class. (How much I have missed, sleeping through class for. oh. About the past eight years.) It was really nifty to talk about things like diffraction and refraction with *real waves*! Why do they never do that in beginning physics classes? It all makes so much more sense now that I have a tactile model for it. And also I really, really need to go to the beach. No, seriously. stellar_dust, you'd better get that job in Hawaii so I can go for a visit and learn how to surf. And the professor was in southern India visiting relatives over Christmas, so he had some somewhat exciting things to say about that too.

Beach! Water! Sky! I've been using a heavily-filtered version of this picture as the desktop on the laptop, since I've got used to using landscapes lately and anything else just feels so *small*... and it didn't help that yesterday I asked on canonistas something I've been wondering about ever since I learned that Gotham City, in defiance of all geographical logic, really *is* somewhere in the vicinity of Lucy the Elephant. And Metropolis is practically on top of Lewes, Delaware. This means that when Batman heads over to help out Supes with something, the only logical way to get there would be to take the Batmobile on the ferry. I wonder if they'd have a special rate for rocket-powered vehicles? (Yes, I know he has a bat-boat and bat-jet, but then he wouldn't have the *car* when he got there.) I went to sleep last night with the persistent image in my head of Batman perched broodily on the upper deck of the MV Cape Henlopen or MV New Jersey, with his cape flaring out behind him in the wind and seagulls trying to land on his head...

I really need to go to the beach. Instead, I'm going to go read 4colorheroines and see if I really *have* been lurking this fandom hard enough to guess all the authors.