tied in the back of the truck, but today Sarah and I moved a bunch of furniture, trimmed the tree to 9 1/2 feet, and dragged it inside. I haven't dared to look at the paint on the three doorways we dragged it through! But it's standing in place now ready to be decorated. The aroma of all that balsam fir is enough to put even Scrooge himself in the mood for Christmas.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Frost on the Windows

This morning there was frost on the upstairs windows. This old house still has the old storm windows and double-hung summer windows and on cold mornings, the inside surface of the storm windows grow frost. Sometimes the patterns can be very beautiful, but the frost represents significantly sub-freezing temperatures outside.year in the Air Force, the winter of 68-69, my home town got a total accumulation of 220 inches of snow - that's over 18 feet of snow! I have seen pictures of the downtown, which is on the southern shore of frozen-over 40 mile-long Moosehead Lake, with snowbanks so high the store owners tunneled through to get to their store entrances. One mid-winter double snowstorm left 59 inches of snow behind.
One winter after I was out of the Air Force, I was working at the ski area at Squaw Mountain. We had a heavy wind-blown snowfall overnight one night and I had the following day off. I shoveled out early and drove up to the mountain to ski and was on one of the first chairs on