Wet, warm and sunshine.   That pretty much sums up the weather we've had today.  We had a misty rain going on early this morning, but around noon it began to clear and got pretty nice by mid-afternoon.  We lost tons of snow, literally.  Water was running everywhere and tonight most of the snow is gone except where it's been piled up by shoveling, drifting or snow blowing.   It hasn't been exceptionally warm, but in the 50s is good enough.  Fred was at Bill and Diane Rossi's this morning and took this picture of the flag - it's listing a bit, but as you can see, the ice is still very white and hasn't pulled away from the shore much yet.  Someone was fishing in back of the islands on Wednesday, I think it was, and once melting gets serious, it's hard to find a place to get from land onto solid ice, so that tells us we have a while to wait.

Henretta is close to finishing logging in tickets - tonight she estimates she has about 1,000 more to enter.  The top picture was taken on April 11 - we figured she was about half way through; and today she sent a second picture showing us she's almost at the end.  There are approximately 2000 tickets per box.  We won't have a definite count until
she's finished and all the on-line tickets are added - we'll let you know.

The contest patterned after ours in Goshen, Massachusetts, is over.  The clock stopped there at 4:17 a.m. today.  Pretty neat - 4:17 a.m. on 4/17.  That's an easy one to remember.  They still have plenty of snow/ice on their little pond, by looking at the pictures, but their flag was set up near some sort of spillway, I think, and things open up there first.  Our contest always lasts longer than theirs, but I was a little surprised it happened down there as fast as it did - Bob Labrie sends out a newsletter periodically, and things were very wintery there until just a couple weeks ago - a lot like us.

We're definitely getting there, and we'll have regular updates on the ice conditions posted on home page soon; and keep checking the web cams, they are working off and on.  Diane says nobody can seem to figure out why they are finicky this year.  Maybe they got tired of all that cold weather and haven't warmed up yet.  Anyway, I just went on (using Internet Explorer) and they were working fine.