We've had another very nice day and got shed of a lot of snow.  Not only that, but late this afternoon I finally saw some robins making whoopie out in our yard.  It's really good to have them back here.  There still aren't many bare spots right around our house where they can find food, but there are only a few birds so far so there shouldn't be a problem.  This photo is at the edge of our driveway next to the big spruces.  The robins seemed to like darting in and out of the thick branches. Spring is here, but it hasn't been ideal as it probably won't freeze up again tonight, making about three warmish nights in a row, and that may mean the maple sugar season will taper off rapidly, if it hasn't already in some places.

We told you yesterday about Ted Palmer-Benson, the guy with the drone and camera outfit visiting the pond; today Diane sent me a picture he'd shared with her.  Really nice quality and gives us a bird's eye view of her house and the neighbors'.  You can almost see our house over the ridge at the top right!  It also gives you a good idea of how much snow there is still left around the pond.  Don't forget to click on the picture to enlarge it.

We got our phone and DSL back today.  We were blaming Fairpoint, thinking they were tinkering with stuff or that after the long strike things had gone awry and we were paying the price, but it turned out to be a very old phone connection where the line comes into our house.  The covering on the wire had deteriorated letting water and snow onto it and then the heavy snow around the box had pulled the wire nearly off the terminals and finally broke it, and that's why we at first got intermittent phone outages and only very slow DSL, and finally nothing.  It took the Fairpoint serviceman about 5 minutes to locate the problem and fix it.  Now we are back to normal with all our gadgets working perfectly. Both of us were playing "catchup" answering e-mails and doing the normal stuff on line this afternoon, but tomorrow we should be pretty much back to our daily routines without the frustration of finicky internet service.  

The next thing we're going to try to remedy is relocating the satellite dish so that next winter Fred won't have to climb onto the roof to clean off the dish every time we get a heavy, wet snow.  I'm hoping we can get it closer to the ground, but that may not work, of course.  We took down a lot of the trees in back of our house a couple years ago, so I'm hoping that will help.  It's worth a try, and if it works it will be way better than having him climbing around on the roof in the dark during a blizzard.  No, I don't "send" him out there on nights like that - he insists.  I think on some level he enjoys the challenge.  It's a man thing, I guess.  I do appreciate it, but I'd really rather not have to worry about digging him out of a snowbank one of those nights.