Another glorious day with lots of sunshine and moderate temperatures. We walked down W. Shore Road this afternoon, and although it was easier than being on snowshoes, there was a lot of traffic and it wasn't nearly as enjoyable. Many of the vehicles that passed us seemed to be going way too fast on snow packed/icy winter roads. We don't wonder they sometimes end up in a snowbank. We always go single file and get far out onto the shoulder, which is no easy feat since the road is now well humped up with frost. One has to be like a mountain goat to stay upright on the slippery shoulders where there's no salt or sand, and we just hope we can dodge 'em if the vehicle begins to go out of control. We saw a couple spots where someone had apparently gone into the snowbanks, and that doesn't inspire confidence one bit. It was nice, though and we got some photos.

The White Mountains were beautiful in the distance. The sun was hitting them just right for a nice picture looking past the narrows and over West Danville.

Along the way we noticed what looks like part of an iron bed across the road from Phil and Joyce Rogers' place. I expect it is there either as a gate or for some of Joyce's lovely flowers to climb on in the summer. And across the pond, lots of tracks of snowmobiles. There were hardly any there when we were by on Thursday, but the pond was quite active today.

There was a community of ice fishing shantys near the access area. Several seemed to have been set up today. It's trout fishing season, so everyone is out. There was also some activity on the eastern shore, but that seemed to be mostly snowmobiles. The photo on the left is near the access area and there were one or two shantys we couldn't fit into this one shot. The picture on the right is at the upper end of the pond where there were one or two fishermen and a couple of dogs romping. You can see that there has been a lot of snowmobile traffic in that area.

We also noticed the ledges above the Rogers' garage have yellow ice coating them. There are lots of springs all along the hillside above West Shore Road, and this is a result of that. There isn't a real waterfall there, just runoff with sediment from above sliding down over the ledges and making icicles in the cold.

As we were nearing home, and had been dodging traffic on the road, we noticed there were several trails of high altitude airplanes overhead. At one point there were three that seemed to be converging and we wondered just how far apart they really were. From our viewpoint, it looked as if they were all pretty much at the same altitude, headed north, east and west. They passed without incident, so I guess they knew where they were better than we did. Last night a helicopter went by our house very low, and we both rushed to the window to watch it. They often go over our house, but generally are quite a bit higher than this one. It was a clear night, probably a good night for flying.

Fred found a couple of interesting articles for me to post. Here's one about the Cabot Sock Company - Cabot Socks

Then there's this piece about a Danville artist Curtis Hale and Mary Azarian, a well known artist who used to live in Cabot. Artists

Which reminds me, we had a flyer in the mail today from the Cabot School Board thanking everyone for their suggestions and concerns regarding the school budget for 2010-2011, which will be voted upon on Monday, March 1st at 6:00 p.m. This letter states that the board has agreed upon a proposed budget that is $260,000 lower than this year's budget. If the budget is approved at town meeting, the result will be "a 2010 homestead property tax rate of $1.410 per $100 of assessed value, which is the same rate as last year's."

The letter goes on to say that changes will need to be made in the way the school operates to deliver the same quality education with a reduced budget, but they are asking the administrators to look carefully at way that can be accomplished.

Now it will be up to the voters to decide if they are willing to make some changes at Cabot School or if they are willing to endure higher costs for educating the children. It seems to me the School Board has done a good job of trying to keep the cost of education affordable in these difficult economic times, but we've seen strange things happen at our town meeting before, so it will be interesting.