Just a quick note to tell everyone what a beautiful, but cold, day it has been here.  We finally got sunshine a little after high noon, but it did little to warm us up.  My weather station is reading 12 degrees, and that's usually a couple degrees warmer than the other thermometer at the back of the house.  We had a couple inches of new snow, but it blew around so much it was nearly impossible to measure and this morning there was an inch less than there was yesterday.  I'll need to go out with my yard stick eventually and take several readings and average them to send to CoCoRaHS.  The wind piled snow onto our front deck so it was hard to even get a good measurement on my snow board this morning, but the whole process of measuring snow is "by guess and by gorry," so I don't worry much about it.





We went to St. Johnsbury today to ship off the hard drive for my computer - so I'm fumbling along on our old laptop.  It's working ok, but I'm just getting used to the keyboard, using a mouse because I'm totally frustrated using the finger pointing method of moving things around.  On our way home, we stopped at 

the fishing access and got pictures of Shelly Walker's new house over on West Shore  Road, and of the first fishing shanty to appear this year.  There was an interesting bit in the Caledonian Record  last night about safe amounts of ice.

According to the University of Vermont Extension Service, "No ice is safe ice."  That said, the article (about Newport's Kingdom Games Director, Phil White going through the ice with his pickup truck on Lake Memphremagog this weekend) went on to state that people should stay off ice that is less than 4 inches thick; walking single file on 4 to 6 inch thick ice should be safe; 6 to 10 inches should support ATVs and snowmobiles; small cars and pickups need 10 to 16 inches and larger vehicles need over 16 inches to be safe.  They included measures to take when you go out on the ice in order to be able to escape from your vehicle if it breaks through. It would probably be a good idea, especially this year when our season was so messed up, to review those safety measures.  I found a site that has slightly different information, but it seems to be about the same:   CLICK HERE.

Things don't look quite lined up at the top of this page, but until I get more experience on this laptop, I'm going to get mixed results, I'm afraid, so for tonight, I'm going to congratulate myself that I got this much posted - pictures are often a pain to keep in place.  I know you'll figure it out.