We had a fairly good blizzard type snow storm last night. Lots of wind and some snow. It looks like perhaps 4-5 inches on my deck. I haven't been out to measure it yet. It's hard to say how much snow there was because it was blowing around so much. It's still snowing lightly this morning, but the wind has died down. It's cold - only 20F, but warming slowly as daylight increases.

Now the wind seems to have picked up again and it's swirling off the roof and I can see the trees high on the hillside in back of our house swaying. They are catching the wind on Cabot Plain - where there's nothing between those treetops and Canada to slow the wind down. It's a cold, windy place to live, but always great weather there. Blizzards were always stronger and more dangerous, and so were electrical storms. I grew up respecting all sorts of weather and while I used to love being out in it all (except thunder storms!) back then, I prefer watching from a safe, warm house these days.

I remember walking to school across the "flat" between our house and the school on windy, snowy days like this. I was bundled up in a heavy woolen snowsuit - pants that had a bib and straps over my shoulders, and a matching heavy woolen jacket large enough to go over a heavy sweater. I wore hand-knit socks, a touque and double mittens (all knitted by my Scottish grandfather McAllan) and my mother always wrapped a big woolen scarf around my neck that I could pull up over my mouth and nose. With my touque pulled down over my forehead to almost meet the scarf, there was only a small slit so I could see, but I was usually perfectly warm. 

When I got to school, we all often had to keep our outer clothing on until the wood furnace could heat up the big school room. With snow sifting in around the big windows, that sometimes took most of the day. We just moved our desks away from the windows into the center of the room where the big single register pipe brought warm air (and usually smoke) from the furnace to the second floor school room. 

The Cabot Plain School, 1937.

Oddly, the hot-air register was high on the wall and therefore we felt little direct heat from it.  It was warmer in the basement, and sometimes we went down there for classes to wait for the upstairs to warm up. I think it would have worked better if there had just been registers in the floor to let the warm basement air come up into the school room - the old furnace was always hot and there was also a wood-burning cook stove in the basement. I remember the big pipe that brought the warm air up was in one corner of the girls' cloakroom, and that's where we all put our mittens and socks to dry when they got wet. I can still smell it - wet wool! Ugh! It was always warmer in the girls' cloakroom than it was in the classroom. The boys' cloakroom didn't have a hot-air pipe, so it was always cold. Somehow we survived and I don't recall "snow days" at all back then, so we didn't get time off for bad weather.

So this doesn't look like much of a storm so far - but it's cold enough so I'm not going to walk today. I will get my exercise inside, perhaps on the treadmill I seldom use! There is nothing more boring, but sometimes it's necessary.

Stay warm and safe.