I sort of took the weekend off to catch up on some of the historical society work and got "lost" in a box of material I hadn't looked at except when it first came to me sometime last summer. I often go through a box of things and make notes to myself so I'll have some idea of how I want to proceed to preserve them and make them available in our collection, and I had done that with this box, but even so, there was one envelope of old documents that was a complete surprise. Perhaps I'd overlooked it originally - but it doesn't matter because these papers have been around since the very early 1800's and another few months of waiting to be presented for public scrutiny won't hurt anything.

These are mostly deeds of land being exchanged between the early settlers. Some of the local land owners did a lot of swapping and dealing, gathering abutting land or sometimes apparently just buying low and selling high. Some of the deeds are quit claims between family members, and one was a deed to a pew at the Congregational church. I'm reading and indexing as I put them into sleeves and will then arrange in chronological order for viewing. Sometimes we transcribe them, but most of this batch are written very legibly and I don't think it will be necessary.

This morning I left that project to work on the web site and add some lists of veterans of some of the wars I hadn't listed earlier. It had been several days since I'd worked on the historical society's site and today it did not go well at first. I worked on it most of the morning and by lunch time I was frustrated and about ready to have Fred come in to help, but after lunch it suddenly worked like magic, everything went into place and I got a lot done. I swear I did everything the same as I had earlier, but for some reason everything clicked and I moved ahead.

Speaking of moving ahead - Fred went to try to help Bill Rossi get his snow blower unstuck this morning. I thought it would probably be that Bill had gotten into an icy spot on the driveway and all it would take would be for Fred to give him a push, but it turned out to be more than that. The Kubota was hung up on a granite property line marker. After assessing the situation, they called for Mike Cookson's wrecker. I wish Fred had had the camera, but maybe you can picture it: the snow blower had to be picked up by the wrecker and set back on the driveway. No damage done. I don't think Bill was in it during the rescue, but he was glad to be back in business and both he and Fred though the young man operating the wrecker really knew his stuff. I won't say the operation collected a crowd, but Ray Richer stopped by and I bet more than a few passers-by wondered what the heck was going on.

Bill and Diane had us at their house Saturday evening for Fred's birthday dinner. Diane had made a scrumptious chicken pie and a fabulous chocolate cake. I'd heard about the cake - the recipe is somewhat famous among Joe's Ponders, apparently, and it was even better than advertised. Very rich with an added bonus of chocolate chips in it. We had a great time and Fred is still talking about the cake. He's very partial to desserts, especially chocolate ones.

We got another 3.5 in. of new snow in the night, although the wind blew so hard it was difficult to measure. I took a measurement of the total snow on the ground this morning, too, and reported 10 inches. Again, it was really hard to tell because there were places where it was over a foot deep and other spots it was more like 7 or 8 inches. So I took several measurements in a fairly large area and averaged it. The folks at CoCoRaHS are asking that we measure snow on the ground every Monday, so I'll try to do that regularly from now on. Not always easy, especially when I have to take a core sample and report total precipitation level. The gauge is only about 14 in. tall, so when the snow gets deeper than that I have to take extra samples to get down to the ground. The weather people say it is important for their calculations about spring runoff and the amount of water that will be in rivers.

I must get back to work. I'll be watching the news on WCAX at 11 p.m. tonight to find out more about the Cabot School bus that was involved in a crash with a Jeep this afternoon. From what I know now, there were no injuries, but I'll try to get more details of who was involved and how it happened. I didn't have my scanner on at all today, so I messed knowing about it when it happened.