melting... ?

The day after the last post, we got the kids ready, drove to school, and guess what, no one was there. The schools weren't canceled due to the weather, and it was not a regional holiday in the official list of school holidays. No, the school has its own set of additional holidays that we have not been told about. We asked the next day when we went to the school again to see if it might be open and guess what, it was. So now we have a list of these additional holidays the school decided on but didn't communicate to us, and I can't help feeling it is only a matter of time until the next surprise ("what, you didn't know we had a required school trip on Saturday..."). (This is only really a problem for us, the other parents are part of a community and talk to each other all the time so they know what is going on without even trying; it doesn't occur to them to tell us and that we wouldn't know something that is so obvious to them.)

The weather, the days have really gotten longer and it feels very nice to have sunlight around again. It warmed up a lot this last week and melted 90% of the snow away. In some places the sidewalks became long trenches of ice full of melted water and people were walking in the road while some others were out chipping away at the ice to let the water drain out of the walkways. I'm sure the animals are relieved, there are places along the drive to school where the bark has been newly stripped off of the trees (from before the snowmelt). The spring flowers (yellow Winterlinger) were blooming under the snow and revealed as it melted around them. It even rained a couple times (premelted snow was falling), which is something we haven't seen in a while. The skate-sail people have packed up and left because the ice on the lake is too thin now from the melting (V saw them packing and the license plates on their vehicles were from places like Estonia and Russia). Last weekend we drove up to the beach to see the snow and ice next to the ocean, which is still an odd sight to me that I am not used to. There were roundish blocks of greenish ice that I think is frozen seawater. The snow was blown into large ridges right up the the edge of the water in some places. In one place there was a huge, deep pile of mussel shells the gulls were picking over. I told the kids we were looking for amber because no one has been looking for a while with everything covered in snow and ice, so we walked along the narrow edge of sand looking through the shells, driftwood and seaweed. In some places the sand was washed over snow so if you stepped on what looked like a normal sandy beach your foot would sink into the snow underneath. It looked odd to scrape away brown sand and see bright white snow underneath. The fjord in Kiel was frozen over and I drove as far as the island of Fehmarn where the Baltic was frozen for a ways extending out into the sea. People were out on skis with parasails pulling them along in some of the large fields.

But, the last couple of days it has been snowing off and on again.