It's snowing. There isn't much on the ground, and for a while the sun came out early this morning and some melted, but I think we're in for snow showers most of today. That's our back lawn and the covered garden.

I took this picture of the hill above Rt. 15, actually Davidson Road, to show you how the snow is sticking to the frozen road that winds up the hillside to the little camp at the edge of the woods. This was about 9 o'clock and lots of the snow had melted on that hillside, but then I took the picture of the apple tree in our yard (below) and there was still snow showing on this side. A few minutes after I took that picture, a big fat partridge landed in the tree, but it stayed only moments - not long enough for me to get a picture. It probably heard or saw us through the window. Partridges often roost in the ornamentals and feast on the crab apples nearby.

The thermometer outside my office window is showing 34 degrees, and hasn't moved all morning. I reported .2 in. of snow on my CoCoRaHS report, and there were a few other reports of snow in the area.

Here is another interesting weather link I may have given you before - its the official NOAA site.

http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/

There are some interesting charts showing what they think the weather will be in the coming months. They may have more technology than The Farmer's Almanac, but I don't know how their predictions measure up for accuracy. Actually, for all we know, NOAA could be at least one of the guides the folks at the almanac use.

I watched some interesting cloud formations late yesterday afternoon. We could see the storm clouds coming down from Walden, but just ahead of those, this big one in the southeast caught the sun's rays for a few moments, and then we got dark very quickly. At that point we were still getting rain, but during the night it changed to snow. Below is the view looking northeast across the pond as the dark clouds came down from Canada.

We will try to get down to the building sites this afternoon and let you know how things are progressing. With temperatures like these, the men will be anxious to get everything closed in so they will at least be out of the wind and snow.

We had one of the energy experts stop by yesterday to do an infrared inspection on our house to see if there might be other ways we could save energy. These same folks did the winterization for us last year, but they didn't use this particular technology. It shows the makeup of the building - studs, insulation, etc., on a screen and registers heat and cold. Turns out, we're in pretty good shape for an older house, and there were no recommendations for further work. Fifty years ago when my father built this house, building materials and methods were different. Apparently he built a pretty tight building, and with the improvements we've made, we are doing okay. Any tighter and we'd need to pipe in outside air to get appliances such as the furnace and clothes dryer to function properly. I hardly see the wisdom of that.

I worked briefly at the historical society building yesterday. We had the old pot-bellied wood stove going and it was toasty there. We were putting things away for the winter, and there will be at least one more work session before the building is closed until spring. By then I will hopefully have some of these boxes out of here. This isn't everything - I have several more boxes in our basement, and there's one section of my office I'm not going to show you - it's far too cluttered, but I know what's there and can find things, it just looks awful.

The top picture is of files of documents and boxes of items waiting to be dealt with; the next one is a box of the albums that are "in process," and another box with documents sorted by subject which will grow over time until I have enough to make a decision about how I'll handle them. Below is the overflow. Boxes of treasures waiting to be sorted, scanned or otherwise taken care of and preserved. Not all of this is Cabot Historical Society material - I also have some Joe's Pond Ice-Out material given to me by Homer Fitts that I will be putting in order at some point. So now I need to get back to work . . .