snow joke

Snow pellets... a little bit different to hail.... I'd say hail is made up of tiny ice balls, but the weather today was much softer than that, like polystyrene balls that rolled along the ground upon landing and almost instantly dissolved like snowflakes would on your tongue..... intermittent bursts of sunshine and blue skies mingling with silver, grey clouds tipping snow pellets at forty-five degrees in the wind.

It wasn't unpleasant walking conditions.... but that was easy to say cos the weather was coming from behind me.... I wouldn't have wanted to be walking headlong into it. 

The dog thought otherwise, and regularly jumped like someone or something had nipped her arse.  On the whole she was pretty good on the walk apart from her reactivity as the same dog passed us twice in different directions, attached to a jogger.  The dog's reaction to other dogs while she is attached to a lead, is generally, embarrassing.  This was no exception to that rule.

Having recently acquired a book about mosses, i figured I'd keep my eyes open for some examples that i might be able to identify.....

I found a feather moss of some description.... a grimmia.... some sort of fancy lichen......  found that the identification book was, perhaps, not as easy to use as i first thought it might be..... persevere! **

and in other news, today, our group photo of the work we did yesterday on Marsden Moor made its way into the little weekly newsletter.... infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy!

and in other other news..... both our vehicles seem to be "buggered" at the moment.....  not great timing, but then when would it be?

** having just gone back to the book and looking at a photo, i think i identified Ceratodon Purpureus - Redshank, to give it a colloquial name.