I'm with you, Gnu. It's February, fer-pete's-sake! Snow is to be expected, even though the past two winters have been "open" winters with very little snow. And this is going to be SNOW -- not "wintry mix", not snow turning to rain. It's not going to be THAT cold (not summer, but 40°F by Tuesday) and it's supposed to be light and FLUFFY, not sodden heavy wire-pulling-down crap.

Okay, it'll be windy so there'll be drifting.

I think the worse problem will be high tide Saturday morning in Hampton, NH around 10. And further up the coast. High tide with the wind behind it.

But I'm not only inland, but a bit uphill, too, from the coast.

As usual, in case of power failure (altogether too common since we're with the Co-op where the power goes out if a butterfly slams into a pole), we've got water, beer, food that can be eaten cold, batteries, everything that needs charging is charged, firewood and a woodstove.

Winter of 2007-2008 it snowed every third day. I remember it well as I broke my arm in December and we HAD to plow the driveway each and every time it snowed so I could get to doctors, etc. You'd just get it cleaned up and we'd have another 6+ inches.

There's a lot of talk lately about New England's "Blizzard of '78" -- the anniversary was Feb. 6. I was living in Cape Porpoise, Maine at the time and managing a year-round shop in Kennebunkport. Not so much snow as the rest of New England, but ice and flooding. Some of the highest tides of the year, high storm surge and the wind pushing it. The Lord's Point Inn washed out to sea. We (on Cape Porpoise) were an island -- Back Cove and Porpoise Cove met...again. What a lot of people forget is we had practice a month previous with the storm of January 9th. Yesterday morning I reread my clipping from the York County Coast Star of all the coastal damage in Maine. When the river started coming through the floorboards of the shop, I got wires off the floor, secured the place and waded out to my ride home, getting there before the Cape was cut off. Reminded myself with the picture in the paper of the amount of water at the foot of my road.

In the early April storm of 1982, Tom and I were snowed in here in Nottingham for over three days (while my boss fretted). Heavy, wet snow -- that's the stuff I hate. And even with the town clerk living next door (Nottingham was shut down until she could get out), it was 3 days before they finally got a front end loader through the road. And it got stuck just above us.

This nor'easter is certainly not going to be as annoying as it could be. But we don't intend to drive to Portsmouth for the Press Room session this afternoon. The beautiful part of "retirement" is I don't have to drive when the weather sucks. We'll have to make music at home.

Linn