We were promised snow flurries and that's what we've had.  All day.  Not much has fallen in total, I measured about an inch yesterday, and about the same has probably fallen today, but more is promised over the next few days, and super cold weather in the bargain.  We all knew we weren't going to escape winter, so we'll deal with it as usual.  I'd say we're just about half way through what a normal winter would be, so in another two months we should be into spring for real.

I took a chance and walked Jamie and Marie's hill today.  I played it smart, though and not only had my cleats on, but I also took a pair of ski poles.  I don't know for sure, but I think they saved me from taking at least one nasty tumble.  I might have been able to recover balance when one foot did a quick skate coming down the hill, but I was glad I had the poles.  It's amazing how fast your feet can go out from under you on ice.  The snow had covered the ice but it was too cold for it to really stick much, and the ice was definitely not the soft kind I could dig into, so not only could I not see the really icy spots, no matter how hard I stamped the cleats wouldn't dig in - they just turned into a dozen little skates on the bottom of my boots.

I ran onto something unusual today in an issue of the North Star published in 1817 in Danville.  There was an ad by a merchant saying he would buy items such as apples, cider, fulled cloth and Do-Tow-Do.  I am not familiar with "do-tow-do." If someone has heard of it, I'd be very interested in knowing what it was.  E-mail me at janebrown@fairpoint.net.  I Googled for it, but found nothing.  I have some reference books that I'll check, too, but I don't have much hope of finding it.  The item was only mentioned once, and that is odd because in those old papers generally the same ads ran for several weeks.  

The reason I'm searching the old issues for West Danville items is  for the history we're doing.   There were no references to the community at the outlet of Joe's Pond as "West Danville" in those early papers.  Either West Danville folks were living very quiet lives in those days, or the publisher just didn't separate them from the rest of Danville.  I have to rely on names and other clues to figure out if an item pertains to West Danville or not, and it's very time consuming.  There's still interesting stuff in those early issues, though.  I'll share some later, when I've finished searching to the end of 1817.