This is it, folks!  The Ice-Out Contest closes tonight at midnight!  If you want tickets, you'll have to buy 10 on-line by going to this page: Pay on-line for Tickets.  There are only minutes left to purchase tickets!  If you're reading this on April 2nd, you won't find that page available.  You'll have to wait until June and then you can purchase tickets for the 2016 Ice Out Contest!

Tickets have sold very well this year in spite of the lousy weather.  We expected nobody would even think about the ice going out with it so cold and wintery still, and therefore they wouldn't be inspired to buy tickets, but that apparently wasn't the case.  Perhaps because so many people have cabin fever, any diversion is a good thing and after all, this whole game was founded on combating cabin fever all those years ago.  

We still have well over two feet of ice and a crazy weather mix ahead with rain tomorrow, snow Saturday and cold Sunday forecast.  We can't seem to break the pattern for more than a day, but each day there is a little improvement.  It was sunny today, but there was a mean wind again and although the snow and ice on our driveway softened a little, there wasn't a lot of melting going on.  The rain may change things - if we get rain at all.  It could be we'll just get more snow.  

We are thinking we've had crazy weather recently, but today as I was going through archived Caledonian Record issues I came across a brief bit about a young girl who "picked a lovely bouquet of apple blossoms."  It briefly crossed my mind that it must have been a slow week for news to be reporting picking bouquets, and then I realized I was looking at column written in the second week of November, 1906.  Apple trees blooming in November?  How crazy is that?  A week later there was a report of a big snow storm, and the winter progressed quite normally from then on.

Some of the freakish weather back in those days was a tornado in May of 1866 that took down barns and flattened trees and fences; there was so much snow by the first week in January 1879, there was an actual avalanche just south of West Danville that shattered windows and filled Robert Lane's house with snow and blocked the road for days; in 1887, March storms stalled trains through West Danville; in 1894 the pond was frozen over by the third week in November, the thermometer fell to zero with a great deal of wind and the deep cold lasted through March - does that remind you of the winter we just had?  In 1900 the ground was white with snow near the first of May, high winds in September toppled apple trees and blew the fruit off the trees; and the first snow came on October 16 - how's that for a short growing season!  1901 was the year a March snow storm crushed the hall at O. B. Flint's Lake Park.

Turns out this probably isn't such unusual weather after all!