It's A Hot Day...For A White Wedding

I made calls to five friends this morning, and everyone is dragging.  Voices sound ragged, drained, spent...it's August, all right...or Monday weekend hangovers.

One friend told me about a wedding she attended over the weekend.  It was #2 for the Bride, and she hasn't even hit age 30 yet. She wore the full white rig and had the blown out wedding...again. The Bride's mother was telling my friend how much she hates Husband #2, and my friend said, "That's okay, maybe you'll like #3 better." When I expressed surprise at the Bride wearing a formal wedding dress for a second wedding, my friend said, "...and I'm sure she'll wear white again for her third go round." Her father didn't show for this wedding either, and since he's a famous local news personality I won't drop his rotten name here, but shame on you, Dad.

 
           

 

                

Go for something different next time, Toots.  Anything but white.

 

I've become a connoisseur of ice cubes this month. I buy my favorites at the 7-11, and they are made in Easton, Maryland. In my mind, they are the perfect size and texture for drinks. When you're sitting around thinking about what makes "good" ice, it is too hot.

Looking outside at the haze, I started thinking about glacier ice and it's properties. Wondering if anyone could sell ice to Eskimos, I checked to see if I could find an ice plant in Alaska. There is one: Quinntex Ice Alaska. It's located on the Kanai Peninsula, which has a strong fishing industry, and the ice plant provides packing ice for the fish plants to keep the catch fresh. Who knew?

D.C. used to have an ice packing plant over on Arkansas Avenue called Beverly Ice. It was housed in this stucco structure with a red tiled roof that looked like a Spanish Mission. A friend reminded me that they had the reputation of not having cloudy ice, because of their process. I used to drive by there as a child and think it was all very mysterious looking and dreaming up weird child stuff about monks making ice.

• Presently, 10% of the world's land area is covered with glaciers.
• Glaciers store about 75% of the world's freshwater.
• Antarctic ice is over 4,2000 meters thick in some areas.
• If all land ice melted, the sea level would rise approximately 70 meters worldwide.
• Glacier ice crystals can grow to be as large as baseballs.
• North America's longest glacier is the the Bering Sea in Alaska.
• From the 17th century to the late 19th century, the world experience a "little Ice Age," when temperatures were consistently cool enough for significant glacier advances.

Glacial ice often appears blue when it has become very dense. When extremely dense, the ice absorbs all other colors in the spectrum and reflects back to the viewer as primarily blue, which is what we see. When glacier ice is white, that usually means that there are many tiny air bubbles still in the ice.

Air bubbles are trapped under hundreds of feets of pressure, so if you put a glacial ice cube in your drink, as the ice melts, the cube begins to make loud musical "ping" sounds. I want "pinging" cocktails.