The weather here at Joe's Pond has caused another casualty. Fella Buttura slipped on the ice Friday and shattered his ankle. No, he wasn't out on the pond - apparently he was on his way into the house. It only takes a minute and one miss-step. 
     Nancy Buttura sent me these photos, taken by Jenny Rafuse about two weeks ago, she said. These two planes flew over the pond and landed on the first pond, the pilots went to Three Ponds for coffee and then left. I bet the folks at Three Ponds never expected customers to be flying in. Snow machines, boats and bicycles, yes, but who'd guess people would fly here?! It just proves you never know what's going to happen around here.
     One thing we can be pretty sure of is that the rain has pretty much ruined skiing until we get more snow. I'm sure there's man-made snow, but underneath it's pretty solid ice in lots of spots. Our driveway was glare ice this morning after it rained last night. Jamie came with his tractor with chains on and broke it up some and scooped away some of the chunks so our driveway is navigable. I was out this afternoon breaking up the thick coating of ice on our deck. I didn't measure it, but in some places it was at least an inch thick. And it was heavy! But I was able to scoot it off the deck easily once it broke into big slabs. Probably didn't do my cedar shrubs any favors - it's leaning against them - but I didn't want to chance falling in order to fix that. There is a hard crust on the snow and I don't know whether it would hold me or not, but either way, it would have been hard to get to them and I'm sure they'll survive ok.
I was thinking as I saw the gleaming crust under the sun today, how much fun I had when I was a kid sliding on the crust. We used to hope for tough crusts like this, and would haul out all sorts of stuff to slide on - cardboard boxes were a favorite, although sometimes we'd use a toboggan. Sleds were sometimes ok, but lots of times the runners would cut through the crust and we'd take a spill. Sometimes we didn't use anything, but that was tough on the seats of our snowsuits. It was great fun, though.