After a blustery start on the day, we ended with bright sunshine and some nice new snow. It's hard to say how much snow we actually got here, but I measured just under 4 inches this morning. Some locations got as much as a foot or more, according to the weather report. The temperature remained pretty seasonal all day, but tonight it has slipped into the single numbers above zero, and may dip below zero overnight. We were interested that with yesterday's snow, the measurement on Mt. Mansfield is a little above what it was last year at this time - and last year we thought we had lots of snow. The continued cold nights will also continue to make ice, so it's looking a little more "normal" for our Ice-Out Contest than it did a week ago. We still have a month of craziness to go, so who knows!

Woody is enjoying having the workers here doing the insulating on the house. It seems to amuse him to sit on a window sill and watch them as they pass back and forth to their trucks. He even ventured outside at one point to investigate them; but it was way too windy for him to stay long today, although he made several short trips and rushed to check out the path Fred shoveled for them to get around to the back of the house. Woody loves to go outside and pop up on the deck railing so he can peer in at me as I'm working here at the computer. That's his signal for me to get up and go to the back door to let him in - even when he's just come from the open garage. He never seems to get that he could go back they way he came.

You can see we have built up quite a bit of snow in the past few days. We hadn't needed to shovel walks until this week, just when the work was scheduled on the house.

Since working on the correspondence with the Vermont Agriculture Experiment Station from years ago, I became curious about when the experiment station was founded. The university was founded in 1791, and merged with the Vermont Agricultural College around 1865. The agriculture research department took over the old Medical College building, turning the medical lab into a milk lab. Then they added a botanical lab and eventually had a dorm in the same building. In 1892 the university awarded their first baccalaureate degree in agriculture. Prof. Joseph Hills, to whom much of the correspondence our historical society has is directed, became head of the experiment station in 1893. Apparently giving away fruit trees in 1892 was their way of reaching farmers - great public relations, and I'm still amazed at how many people availed themselves of the station's services.

I learned something else while researching UVM's Agriculture Experiment Station: In 1924, the first radio broadcast in Vermont originated from the UVM station, WCAX, which was run by students. Now, of course, WCAX are the call letters for Vermont's foremost and oldest television station. The television station was WMVT when it started in 1954, but in 1955 the call letters were changed to WCAX-TV.