Fairies Dancing on the Windowpanes

I promise promise promise this is NOT going to be a post about how cold it is. I will NOT count myself among the rank of "OH MY GOD, IT'S COLD! SO COLD! YOU CAN'T BELIEVE THAT IT'S THIS COLD EVENTHOUGHIT'SDECEMBERANDWESHOULDHAVEEXPECTEDIT."

It seems that even those of you in paradise (otherwise known as San Diego) have experienced bad weather and a sudden drop in the mercury this past week, and if no climate is immune to the arctic chill, then we're all more or less in the same boat.

And seriously, am I supposed to complain about having to see all of that WEATHER out my front window? Even Nick's commute is relatively short and painless. Well, short and highway-less, anyway. He has to feel the pain of driving through a part of the city full of old stately Victorian-style homes that have become derelict and are in various stages of crackification. I know he feels the same sort of sadness that I do when thinking about how far gone these tarnished silver ladies are. But anyway.

The cold snap to us has been pretty awesome. The weather was so mild through most of November, it was hard to believe that the holidays were closing in. Having a chilly Thanksgiving certainly shocked us into remembering that we're not in Kansas (er, San Diego?) anymore, and the snow that blew by our windows these last few days sent us full-on headlong into the holiday spirit. We acquired and decorated our Christmas tree, hung lights around our front windows, and have been playing our favorite Christmas albums* on repeat. I had my own personal victory just last night when I installed a home-brewed (ghetto) self-watering apparatus for the tree, involving a 3-gallon reservoir, 3/4" vinyl tubing, and zip ties to create a siphoning system for keeping that tree fresh and healthy, even if we aren't around for a few days. I even found a big box that I wrapped like a present in which to hide the reservoir. Yea, me! (much patting of self on back)

And as I was finishing the self-congratulations last night, I happened to notice crystals of ice creeping their way up the outer panes of our front windows. As the temperature continued to drop, the crystals crept farther up the window, and I became absolutely entranced by the play of the lights outside on 3rd street, the reflection of the colored lights on the Christmas tree, and the illumination of the creeping crystals by the white lights rimming the windows. I grabbed my camera and my 50mm/1.8 lens and started shooting.



It was interesting to watch the colors picked up by the ice as the stoplights changed (to red, below) or as trucks with blinking lights drove by (blue, above).



As I tried to get closer in on the crystals, I found the photographic limitations of the situation and the lens - I couldn't get quite as close as I wanted (the minimum focal distance is still 1.5 feet), and even at ISO 400, the shutter speeds weren't quite fast enough to get really crisp images. But this was more for fun and illustrative purposes anyway, right? =)



Sitting so much closer to the windows than I ever normally would, except of course for all those times I press my face to the windows to make piggyfaces at the passing cars (ahem. I lie. I totally never do that. Except that once. Or twice.) I happened to notice the faintest outline of letters on the exterior pane. I called Nick over and we sat there, bobbing our heads from side to side to try and get the right angle to discern the letters, trying to figure out what they might have spelled, and most certainly looking like a couple of bobble-headed boobies (the scientific term: bobooblius krakificus).





(I like that first one in particular because of the reflection of the lights on the Christmas tree)

We ended up being able to decipher "GEROBROCKM" - the letters on either edge of the pane were too hard to see with all of the frost. Thus far, Google hasn't been helpful in figuring out what that might have said, but I'm guessing that at some point this unit may have been a law office or some sort of other business that would have had their nameplate on the front windows (facing the corner of 3rd and Wayne, those two windows facing you in this picture that I found on the interwebs).


Given that this building was converted to apartment lofts about 5 years ago and it was hovering between nearly and utterly vacant in the years before that, who knows how long ago those letters were there? And moreover ... has it really been that long since the exteriors of these windows were cleaned? Yikes.

*our favorite Christmas albums, a non-comprehensive list in no particular order:

UltraLounge Christmas Cocktails (Capitol Records, 1996)
UltraLounge Christmas Cocktails Part 3 (Capitol, 2004)
Maybe This Christmas (Network America, 2002)
Maybe This Christmas Too? (Network America, 2003)
Louis Armstrong and Friends, The Christmas Collection (Universal, 1997 and 2003)
Vince Guaraldi A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy Records, 1998)
Blue Note / Yule Be Boppin' (Capitol, 1997)
(and winner for cheesiest entry) The Choirs of Lyons Township High School Christmas album (1997, I think)