Quick question about yesterday's blog. I left you guessing what you call an octagon. Did you get achteck? If so, you are right. "Acht" is the number 8 in German, and "eck" is the word they use for shapes just like we use "agon". Ok - now on to today's blog.
Today, the children are off of school due to a religious holiday here in Germany. But in order to make up the missed school time for this one holiday, they will have to go to school on Saturday. But, both schools have made this extra day a fun day, so it won't be sooo bad for the kids. And my husband and I will get a little time for shopping and breakfast without the kids, too!
The weather today is about the same as the last couple of days - upper 30s to low 40s, but we are having a light rain today. As I said before, I have been checking the forecasts daily to see if this weekend's pronouncement of snow actually pans out. It is still considered a long range forecast, but all the ones I look at are calling for snow on Saturday. Depending on what the kids do at school, it could be an extra fun day with the first measurable snow!
My question of the day yesterday asked how many millimeters of snow makes 1 millimeter of rain. In the US, we measure rain in inches. We know that if it rains 1 inch of rain in the US, we have had a fairly decent downpour. If it rains 5 inches, then we likely have flooding, but if it rains only 0.01 of an inch of rain, the ground is hardly wet. Here, they measure it in millimeters most commonly, or also sometimes as milliliters per square liter. Also, in the states, they have a way of determining the average amount of water equivalent in inches based on the depth of the snow. For example, on average, if it snows 10 inches, that would equal the same as if it rained only 1 inch. If it is dry fluffy snow (like in Colorado) then the water equivalent is not as much, but if it is a heavy wet snow, then the water equivalent is much more. The same holds true here, but they use the metric system instead where on average 1 cm of snow would be the water equivalent of 1 mm of rain. Now what does that mean in something you can recognize? Let's do the simple conversions of this: 1 inch is 2.54 centimeters. 1 cm is 10 millimeters. And here, the general ratio is 1 cm of snow = 1 mm of rain (a 1 to 10 ratio just like in our inches). So if it snows 25 centimeters, that is about the same as 10 inches (on average) of snow and melts on average to 1 inch of rain. Again, it is important to note that 1 cm of wet snow has much more water content in it than 1 inch of dry powdery snow, so all of these are averages.
To make this very long story short, though, all I can say is I hope we get a bunch this weekend!
The word for the day is Snow: der Schnee (shnay). As a refresher word, don't forget Rain: der Regen (ray gehn where the g is a hard g as in goat).
The question for the day is: "Who is Boris Becker?"
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
