Nancy Burgess (Cove Road) took these pictures of those geese that George Parizo spotted yesterday. She said she couldn't figure out at first what was out on the ice (top picture looking across at Richard and Carmen Gagne's, just up the road from George Parizo's).  With some zoom, she could make out the black blobs were geese. Today the pond looks kind of slushy, as if there is water on top of whatever ice had formed.  However, it is still very much frozen over from what we could see when we went to W. Danville this afternoon.

These are some pictures Fred took late yesterday afternoon, after the snow had begun to let up.  That's Jamie plowing his driveway with "The Peach."  We have been lucky not to lose power - so far.  You can see the trees have loads of snow on them and could interfere with power lines.  The more recent snow is quite light, but the temperature today has been around 30 degrees and if we get more snow tonight it could be the heavier variety.  I measured another three inches this morning, and there are  about 7 inches out at the post, so the ground is well covered again.  Perhaps this snow will stay with us.  The weekend forecast is for much colder temps.  It's beginning to look more like Christmas!

I was surprised this morning when a gentleman who works for the National Park Service at the site of the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii stated a high percentage of the young people who visit the memorial don't have a clue what it's about and "don't even know who won the war."  That's really hard to believe.  Are schools not teaching history anymore, or perhaps just not in a meaningful way so students can relate and remember?  It was a few generations ago, of course, but still . . .

With Pearl Harbor Day coming up tomorrow, I've been thinking about what a terrible war that was.  I remember more about the day-to-day things, the reports on the radio, rationing, collecting metal for the war effort, buying savings stamps and bonds; but I don't know much about the political side of the war.  This morning I learned that U. S. was totally unprepared for a war in 1941 - that we had tried to remain neutral and were rated only 14th strongest country militarily, somewhere near Sweden, if I heard correctly.  When so many of our ships and planes were damaged at Pearl Harbor, it's a testament to all the people of our country that we were able to win that war.  U. S. was at war with not only Japan, but on December 10, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on U. S.  The war was fought on two major fronts - in Europe and the Pacific, all at the same time.  WWII ended in Europe in May of 1945 and on the Pacific front in August, 1945.  Over 400,000 U. S. service men and women killed and nearly 700,000 wounded and over 30,000 missing. Today we are the strongest military force in the world, followed by Russia, China and Japan, in that order - I looked it up.  Tomorrow I'll be thinking of all the sacrifices made after Pearl Harbor was hit.