During the night we had a really hard downpour. It woke me up around 12:30 and seemed to last a long time. There was a little thunder and some lightning - kinda like summer! - and I knew there would be a whole lot less snow on the ground this morning.

There are still patches in the woods and on our back lawn, but mostly it's gone around our house. The ice on the pond must have taken a real hit, but it is holding on. The temperature didn't go down much last night and right now is 51 degrees, so things are really warming up around here and melting fast. There's lots of fog, This picture is how West Shore Road looked when Fred went to check the clock at Homer's at 7 a.m.











Fred could barely make out the flag. He said he had to wait a bit until it cleared enough to see the flag. The wind moves the fog around, so he waited until it cleared a little and got these pictures. The platform is still tilted which seems to indicate the ice has melted more on the south end of it (no surprise there!) It is surprising that sometimes it tips precariously but doesn't go down like you'd expect it to. We think with the water high this morning, and bound to get much higher with all the water coming into the pond from the swollen brooks, things could begin to change rapidly.

This shows how high the water is around Ned and Carolyn Hamilton's boat landing. I intend to get down to measure at Walter Ruf's later today. Walking on the road won't be fun - I think I heard the road machine go down through a few minutes ago, so that will stir things up a bit. I tried to see the road to tell if I it really was the road crew, but can't tell without going down to look - and even then it's hard to know because they may have been headed for further down the road where the potholes are the worst. I hope it was them and if they can help those potholes and dips, we'll put up with poor walking conditions, for sure.

I'm looking out at my vegetable garden, beginning to think about getting some early planting done. It is always fun to open it up in the spring to see what's changed over the winter. Last fall I put a heavy coating of mulch over everything before I covered it all with black plastic. Usually most of the grass/hay mulch is pretty well decomposed by spring. Those fish worms stay active all winter under the right conditions. This year there was a deep cover of snow, so they may not have had to go as deep as normal to survive and could do their work nicely under the cover I provided. I'll wait a while for the sun to warm the soil up a bit more before I plant anything. We expect to see the sun again by the weekend, but for now we're literally in a fog!