Surprises

I love surprises.  I really do.  My husband is great at surprises.  Like, he flew me to Atlanta for my birthday (a big one) and arranged for me to be able to pet a sea otter.  Surprises aren't always great, though, and sometimes they're just plain confusing.  The other day I went out to scout a location for a photo shoot.  It's been really snowy where I live the past couple weeks, and the location I was interested in was in a pretty large park.  When I got there, I saw that the space where I'm usually able to park had not been cleared of snow, but in a moment of stupidity my brain nefariously told me "Go ahead, park there.  Your car has four wheel drive.  You've never been stuck before.  Even though the ground is just dirt covered with about 5 inches of icy compacted snow, you'll be totally fine."  I knew as soon as my back wheels left the main road that this had been a bad decision.  Cut to kneeling in the snow trying to dig out my tires with an ice scraper while listening to AAA's on-hold recording on speakerphone from the hood of my car.  So after about 20 minutes on hold and a brief conversation with a real person, I hung up and decided to test my digging efforts.  To my relief, the car slowly broke free of the snow, and I was able to call AAA back from a more sensible parking spot and cancel the tow truck.

Eventually, I did make it to the spot I had envisioned for my shoot, but it looked nothing like I had expected.  I was hoping for one giant but relatively thin icicle.  Instead, I found this:

Magical, right?  I have no idea what would possess someone to do this in this relatively untraveled area, but I've got to say, it cheered me up.  I was thoroughly surprised and confused and enchanted.  I'm assuming whatever was used to color these icicles isn't harmful to the surroundings.  It looked like food coloring or Kool Aid to me, so I'm hoping for the best in that respect. :)  All in all, the day was not a total loss despite the car troubles and not finding what I had expected to find.  This surprise was well worth the trip.