There was light snow in the air when I awoke the other morning causing a nice snow bow with the sunrise.

Eric recently had his year 4 physical and check up – all systems normal. The nurse was entering his data in a laptop and asked him if he knew what letter his name began with. He looked at her and said “E” – that’s Eric, “E”, “R”, “I”, “C”. She nodded, entered the data and said “Aren’t you smart”! Then the nurse asked “Do you know who you live with?” Eric looked at her like how did you get this far? – and said yes – Mom – that’s “M”, “O”, “M” and Dad – that’s “D”, “A”, “D”.

We have about 30″ of snow on our lawn. Fortunately we have been on the fringes of the Snow Belt. It is cool to watch the weather radar show it oscillating N-S, but I would just as soon it stays north. 

I would make the real triangle be Camden, which is west of Rome, Syracuse to the south and Oswego to the north. This past week they have had 90+” of snow in that triangle. Whereas we are expected to get an additional 2-4″ of snow tonight Oswego and areas up there are expecting 6-10″ of snow. This is all pretty remarkable considering that 12 days ago we didn’t have enough snow to go snowshoeing. The daily snowfall map pretty much says it all.

On my way into work today the roads were snow packed, but not bad until I got into Rome. As I turned onto Black River Blvd – the main drag – there was a car off the road in a snow drift. No one was hurt, the woman just slid off the road. A trooper was putting a towing belt on the car to pull her out. There were a couple of cars waiting to make a left turn against the slow moving traffic flow. It caused a back up of traffic through the intersection. I heard someone in back of me beeping their horn. Probably someone pulled into the Ridge Mills intersection and couldn’t pull through – thus causing a momentary gridlock. In Rome NY! Imagine. 

Tonight we shoveled off our deck and dug a path so Trey could get out into the lawn to poop. Then we played on the snow piles our show plow guy had made. Since he has been plowing 4-8″ every day it makes for some sizeable snow piles. We made a small snow cave and then played king on the mountain before coming in for dinner.

Here is a great link that provides a map of daily snow fall amounts and shown as an example below.

This daily amount is accumulated here and shows total accumulated snowfall – good for predicting suitable snowshoeing /winter camping locations.

With the unusually warm winter we have had to date Lake Erie remains unfrozen and we have prime conditions for lake effect snows. Yesterday we got 5-6″ of snowfall and another 8″ last night. I left work and picked up Eric at the baby sitter. Arriving home I found our friend Hobart with his 4WD truck parked overtop our lilac bushes and halfway out on the lawn. It appears Hobart had stopped by to drop off some money to Kathryn to help pay for his wife Jean’s upcoming trip to St Johns. No one was home so Hobart graciously started to plow our driveway and backing up using his mirrors he ventured off the driveway.

I hustled Eric into the house, got him settled in front of the TV and donned my coveralls over my work clothes. We chained my truck to his and easily got Hobart situated back on the driveway where he graciously completed the plowing job and left. The pictures below show the snow after an additional 8″ fell overnight.

El Nino has caused high winds, heavy snow, ice and freezing temperatures in the west.
Here in the East with much mild winter weather we have been blessed.
Global warming has caused a great debate.
This mild winter makes it seem just great.
On this Groundhog Day we think of one thing.
Will we have winter or will we have spring?
On Gobbler’s Knob I see no shadow today.
I predict that early spring is on the way.

I just finished reading an excellent book by Edward Kanze- Over the Mountain and Home Again: Journeys of an Adirondack Naturalist. It is a collection of his essays and they are extemely well written. In one of the articles he cites interesting research on the thermodynamics of changing color coats in winter animals. The fact that snowshoe rabbits, ermines, long tail weasels, ptarmigans change from brown to white may not be so much due to camouflage, but that white hair/feathers don’t contain the pigment melanin. Removing melamin creates empty space within the hair or barbule – thus creating insulating air space.

Some years ago Kathryn & I had been talking with my Mom about the upcoming winter and she pulled out one of those folklore statements about squirrels and nuts or the number of stripes on the caterpillars and it’s relationship to the upcoming winter season. Kathryn & I decided we needed to start our own folklore statement and came up with “The lighter the deer, the harder the year” or “The lighter the doe, the deeper the snow” – I forget which rendition we were promoting at the time. While white tail deer don’t change coat color they do transition to a coarse grey winter coat, with less pigmentation than their summer coats. Our supposed urban myth statement had a basis in fact! So spread our myth along and BTW read Kanze’s book. It is excellent.

I took my $50k-all-metallic hips in for their annual checkup which consisted of x-rays and flexion tests. All the x-rays came back fine; no movement and no separation. We checked out the ‘ratcheting’ feeling I occasionally experience in my right hip and concluded it might be scar tissue or other soft tissue – uncomfortable but not “the edge of a dislocation” as I feared. I told of my current activities of swimming, riding the exercise bike, snow shoeing, hiking and occasional volleyball (with minimal jumping) and got approval for all. Good for another 24 months!

Today Eric got invited over to his buddy Trevor’s for an afternoon of snow sledding and playing. A great opportunity for him to burn off some of his cabin fever from being house bound for two days due to a cold and severely cold weather. Kathryn and I took advantage of the free time and took a snow shoe trip around our property. We tramped down a trail for Kathryn to use for cross country sking later in the week. Only a short ways into our hike we found a perfect snow print of what we assume was a small hawk. We didn’t see any mouse trails or what he/she might have been after, but the print showed every wing and tail feather.

Kathryn’s hand is shown alongside for purposes of scale.

Ed/Kelly/Izzabella and Billie Jo/Billy/Dakota came to our house on Sunday to celebrate a belated birthday party. Izzabella and Dakato enjoyed playing with Eric’s toys. After lunch we all went outside for a little sledding. In the pictures below Kathryn gets all the kids to take turns hammering.