The winter wonderland persists. Most of us are already pretty tired of battling snow in one way or many others. This batch is more of the heavy, wet variety and it's weighting down branches, threatening to tip over trees and disrupt electrical service. The roads are a mess, snow blowers have a hard time handling the sticky clods, and as usual, as soon as we get our driveway clear of snow the town goes by with their plow and leaves a foot-high ridge of snow that turns to ice blocks if you don't move it before the temperature drops, as it's bound to do later today. 
     I measured seven inches of new snow this morning. I'm guessing we have maybe 18 inches on the ground, but it's hard to tell. There was some wind and drifting a few days ago when we had several inches of very dry snow; then there was yesterday with above freezing temperatures that settled everything. So . . . unless I'm willing to wade out and measure on the back lawn (which doesn't appeal to me right now!) I can only guess. Last night I was telling Fred that I'd neglected to put out the measuring stake this year (he doesn't pay attention to that sort of thing at all!) he was enthusiastic about heading out to find the hole the pole sets into. Even  with his help, I'm not inclined to go out there and search for a five-inch square flat rock covering a hole in an underground cement block. Maybe after lunch, or maybe not at all.
     I took pictures this morning. The date on my camera is ok, but the time shown is way off. I keep forgetting to fix that. I was actually out at 8:30 to clear off the deck to get to the precipitation gathering tube. Fred was snow blowing and had shoveled the walk and steps - I've asked him to leave the deck for me to do so the snow measurement doesn't get skewed. (Not that this process of measuring snow and precipitation is precise science in any way - but I like to measure in the same place each time and not after there has been snow blown around by shoveling.) 
     By now there may be an additional couple of inches, and it's still snowing steadily. At this rate we'll have at least a foot by the end of the day, I'm guessing. The snow started at just about noon yesterday and although there may have been some periods when it was closer to rain than snow, that didn't last long. We are part of the "higher elevations" the forecasters refer to. The temperature right now is  right around the freezing point. I believe it's going to remain there for the next few days, only heading down a few degrees at night. If we begin to get wind, we could be in more trouble as the trees are very heavy with snow and the ground probably isn't frozen much because of the early snow cover. 
     Now I'm off to clean the turkey carcass to make stock and soup. Dealing with just the breast bones is much easier than the whole turkey bone mass, and I do like turkey soup. This is a soup kind of day!