Today has been dreary and cold. The thermometer didn't seem to show the right temperature compared to what I felt when I went out around noon to get a little exercise. There was a brisk wind kinda from the east so when I was heading back home along W. Shore Rd., it was really cold. Tonight it's snowing, so lots of folks are really happy.








Fred was at Marty's today and the place was busy with snowmobilers. The price of gas has some of them thinking twice about long trips, we've heard, but that didn't seem to be a factor at Marty's today. They were buying gas and food, as you can see above. Then, in West Danville, there were plenty of people milling around on the trail next to the parking lot across from Hastings Store.

I think we only got around 5 inches here, but some places got as much as 18 inches, and ski area folks are overjoyed. We talked with Joe's Ponder Bob Wechsler tonight and he's elated with all the new snow because he's a skier.The forecast was for possibly rain late this afternoon and tonight, but I just looked out and it's snowing pretty hard and the thermometer is reading 32 degrees.

I can tell you someone who is ready for spring, and that's Woody. He hasn't been out much this winter. The icy conditions aren't his cup of tea. This is about as far as he's willing to go - to sit in the driveway and watch the traffic going by for a few minutes - and then he's ready to come in. You can tell by the sour expression he'll be really glad to see bare ground. Enough with this cold white stuff.

I've been working with some correspondence from the late 1800's into the early 1900's directed to the University of Vermont's Agriculture Experiment Station. I didn't know much about it, so I did a little searching and found it was started in 1886. The earliest correspondence I have in our collection is from 1892, and is directed to the professors who were apparently heading up the research station. UVM was founded in 1791, and merged with the Vermont Agricultural College around 1865. I thought it interesting that farmers in this area in particular seemed to be contacting the experiment station for lots of advice. There was a huge give-away in 1892, of free fruit trees, and local farmers signed up to receive the trees and agreed to report on their progress. I was surprised at the variety of trees available - apparently plum, peach and pear trees, and a large variety of apple trees were available.

One gentleman, L. Bancroft, of Berlin, Vermont, listed the trees he already had: 25 apple trees; 8 plum trees; and 3 pear trees in addition to strawberries, raspberries and grapes. He was looking for blackberries and some different varieties of apples. I wondered if many of those apples would go into cider.

Other people were looking for advice on fertilizing their land, controlling pests including beetles and rats, the feed mix for cows and pigs, and in the 1900's they began requesting recommendations on what cream separators were good to buy and seeking suggestions for making better butter.

I'm not sure how we came to have this collection of about 135 letters and postcards, but I believe a relative of one Professor J. S. Hills, I believe. There was a family by that name living in Cabot years ago, and somewhere in some other papers, I've seen correspondence regarding Prof. Hills, so I'm hoping to get that put together with this batch of letters in order to make some sense of it all. It's exciting when I'm able to put bits of scattered information together to make sense.

We're having some weatherizing done to our house - insulation added overhead in spots where the wind moved the existing insulation around, and then we're having some added into the walls. When our house was built, the norm was to use 2x4 construction and fiberglass insulation, and now recommendations are for at least 2x6 construction and either cellulose or foam insulation. We're hoping to save a little fuel by doing this work. They are also going to replace the pedestrian door in our basement. The present door is old and weathered, and we cut a hole in it to install Woody's kitty door. Not the greatest idea we've ever had, but it has worked well for him, and we close it off during the winter. Now he'll have a kitty door in the pedestrian door into the garage and he'll have to come to the kitchen door and knock to get in. That should work a lot better because he often brings in little friends, like squirrels, chipmunks, baby bunnies, field mice and moles during the summer. He would proudly bring his catch to us, usually in the living room, and announce his arrival with a loud "meee-ow," and by so doing, would of course release the critter which usually was very much alive and the chase would be on. This new arrangement should end that fiasco. He can drop them in the garage and they'll have a good chance of escaping into the woodpile or back outside, out of his reach, and we won't need to intervene. We're looking forward to the change.