We've had a little taste of winter today.  The temperature dropped during the night to about 10 above and there has been a cold wind most of today.  There was a sifting of snow on the ground this morning - just a hint of what's coming, if the forecast is correct.

I have been trying to remember to turn on my scanner more often, and when I did that this morning, almost immediately there was a call about a snowmobile on fire on Isham Hill Road.  Apparently the snowmobile was in a garage, and before the fire departments could reach the place, high on the hill on the Route 15 side of Joe's Pond, the garage structure caught fire.  Walden and Danville responded quickly, and fortunately there was a private pond near the building for them to get water, so they had the fire knocked down fairly quickly.  We could see the emergency vehicles going along a road through the field that shows to the right of the smoke in the pictures above, and hear the chatter on the scanner as the fire departments arrived and got to work.  The place is 179 Kindberg Road, a dead end apparently off of Isham Hill Road.  We hope there wasn't too much damage, but any fire is serious, and we are sorry someone's holidays were marred by this catastrophe.

Fred and I have been trouble-shooting my old Epson scanner/printer most of today.  It has refused to print for me recently - failing slowly so I've had to feed some of my printing projects to Fred's laser printer; but I'm now ready to print photos for the Cabot Historical Society and today it wouldn't let me do that.  I need to have a color printer, and have been very happy with Epson products - I think this is the second Epson printer/scanner I've had, and it is nearly 10 years old.  It's a "Workforce 500" and wouldn't you know, we just got a full set of ink cartridges for it.  I'm hoping someone else can use them - the color cartridges are #T0684 and #T0681 for the black cartridge.  After talking to the Epson help desk, we decided to purchase a new printer-scanner, an updated version of the one we have, for probably less money than this one cost, although we didn't check that, and almost certainly less than we could ship this one someplace for repairs.  I don't think this machine owes us anything.  I'm made literally thousands of scans and copies with it and sent I don't know how many fax messages.  It's like an old friend and I hate to part with it, but with work piling up, it's time has come.

I just hope we're not caught in a "things happen in threes" situation where there will be a couple more things breaking down shortly.  I'm going to think positively and keep my fingers crossed.  Not that I'm superstitious but just saying - it could happen. 

In the meantime, my snow measuring pole is in place, the snow shovel is near the door onto the deck where I can reach it to get to my precipitation collector tomorrow morning, and Fred has the snow blower gassed up and ready.  Oh, yes, and our snow tires have been on for weeks.  We're ready.