Saturday, August 16, 2008

Three's a charm, right?

I guess I'm a feast or famine kind of blogger.  I'm sitting here with the A/C off, the window open, and my feet are freezing.  The kids are outside playing with their coats on!  It is the middle of August and only 56 degrees at 10 am.  Crazy!  

There's something else I like about Santa Fe--the nights are never sweltering.  We are a desert at 7000 ft elevation.  It gets hot, but rarely above 100, and it's a dry heat.  The downside?  We are close to the sun and hence can burn easily.  The nights are cool.  The downside?  That's good in the summer months, but in the winter it is frigid in the mornings when we send the kids off to school!  

We learned last winter about supercooling with the water bottles we keep in the van, so I guess there was some sort of benefit to so many mornings below freezing!  (There are some pretty cool videos on youtube on supercooling.  Just google it to find them.)  It's pretty weird the first time you find a bottle of liquid water in your car when it's so cold outside.  You'd think it would be solid ice.  So I picked it up and turned it over, just to be sure it was liquid.  Then the ice crystals started forming and in seconds the whole bottle was ice.  It only works, as far as I remember, with pure water like Dasani in an unopened bottle, and when the water has been cooled to below 27 degrees. Since the water is pure it doesn't have imperfections to start the crystallization. When you agitate the cooled water it gives it the push to crystallize.  Very very cool process!

2 comments:

Emily Hendrix said...

I didn't know about supercooling before--what an interesting phenomenon! It's been cold here, too--rained for 2 days straight and the high temperatures have been around 60. Is this caused by global warming? lol

Emily said...

Wow, that would be cool to see. Makena's teacher is Mrs. Curtis, this is her first year teaching, but she has been an aide there for a while I guess. And Mrs. Weatherford is no longer teaching at the Elem. and is teaching at the High School now. But so far so good, i'm hoping the rest of the year goes by as well.