First…apologies for the title…it was too obvious a pick (also, now you’ve got that dreadful Vanilla Ice cover of a Queen/David Bowie song on your brain for awhile…congratulations!)
The weather this winter has been…interesting. As I write this during the last week of February we have 12 degrees Celsius (54 Fahrenheit) and birds are chirping away outside while some tree thought it a good idea to release pollen into the air, way too early for my eyes to appreciate it. A week and a half ago we had -12 Celsius (10 Fahrenheit) at night and it was definitely thick longjohns time if you wanted to spend extended amounts of time outside in the dark!
The pictures in this post feel like they were taken a long time ago, but in actual real time they were done 10 days ago, on February 14th, 2021. The scene is at Klagshamn beach just outside Malmö, Sweden. We are south of the Öresund Bridge to Denmark and in warmer times the place would be packed with swimmers and sunbathers, grabbing some vitamin D from the heavens (and probably playing way too loud annoying music on their portable speakers…am I starting to sound like an old man…probably…).
I didn’t venture out as far onto the ice as many others did, partly because I am not very partial to the risk of falling through the ice, but mostly because I was there with my father and I didn’t want to have to pick him up from falling over (or subject him to having to do the same for me). So we stuck fairly close to the shore as we carefully maneuvered ourselves around on the rather slippery surfaces. I’ve had enough sudden and unexpected close encounters with ice this winter already!
Okay dad…that’s far enough out onto the ice!
It was a glorious day out by the ocean and the harbor, and on a sunny and clear day like that day was the invigorating effect of going out to the sea was huge. Even on a cloudy and gray day it feels great afterward, so that day perked me up! We should just have had some hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls with us to snack on out on the ice; it’d feel almost like I was back to being a child (until it was time to get up and get off the ice, then I’d most definitely be back to being my current age!).
