7:00 a.m. This note came from Cheryl Castner, who lives in New Jersey and has come to Joe's Pond for summer vacations over the years:

Just wanted to update you...on day twelve (after the storm) our power was restored!!  My little corner of the state also was spared from the nor-easter that blew through last week.  Looking good!

Cheryl lives in Stillwater, New Jersey.  It's no small task for the utility companies in the areas hard hit by Hurricane Sandy, and even with help from crews from other states and Canada, it has been a huge task cleaning up and restoring service throughout.  Cheryl seems upbeat about her situation, and we're glad all is well.

We still haven't heard from some of our JPA members who were probably impacted by the storm, but we're hoping life will soon return to normal for them and we'll hear all is well.  

* * * * *

Later this morning:  We walked at around 7:30, starting off with umbrellas in a wind-driven rain and an outside temperature of 40.8 degrees.  When we got to the top of Jamie and Marie's driveway, we could tell the rain was changing to snow, and by the time we were back home having breakfast, it was snowing hard.  

I just took my CoCoRaHS measurements and found by 9 a.m. we already had a half inch of heavy, wet snow, and it's still coming down with big fluffy snowflakes.  I had a total of .86 in. of precipitation in the collector, and the half inch of snow had .12 in. of water in it.  Temperatures are supposed to be down for at least a few days, so perhaps some of this snow will stay with us.  Right now the temperature is at 30 degrees.  This is what we see from our living room window now, looking towards Route 15.

I brought my snow pole in from the back yard a few days ago - the pvc tube I've marked off to keep track of how much snow is on the ground - so I'll need to get that back out there, I guess.  I had to redo the numbers as I'd left the pole there during the summer and weather and sun had faded them.  I'm so glad we got to walk our fence line yesterday.  We were going to continue on Jamie and Marie's lot, which abuts ours, but it was getting too dark to see the old fence.  

The snow is beautiful, but it's very wet and we'd be drenched if we were in the woods today.  This is the kind of day hunters have to really beat the bushes to get the deer to move.  Mostly they like to hang out in the woods under dense cover of big trees on days like this.  Just like I'm going to hang out inside for the rest of the day, too.