Last night we got pictures from my daughter of snow in Northern Virginia.  My wife and I were talking about them at the table this morning.  She sort of felt left out by not being there for the storm.  Personally I did not miss shoveling all that snow.  I might have suggested that how much shoveling you do has something to do with how you might miss a storm.

As I walked to the end of the driveway to get the newspaper this morning, I thought the north winds had a special bite to them.  Perhaps blowing across 3 feet of fresh snow adds something to the cold.

I know that having that much snow to the west and north of us will make spring a little later this year.  Already the area farmers are talking about the wet weather preventing them from getting their onions and potatoes in the ground.

My tomato planting is about seven weeks away, so there is time for things to dry up before then. 

I think everyone on the east coast is ready for spring.  Yesterday I talked to some real snow lovers who have moaned for more snow for years.  One is still trying to figure out how to shovel the thirty inches of snow off her long driveway.  Another is tired at looking at snow which will not seem to go away.

When snow becomes an almost permanent part of the environment, it loses some of its desirability.  We once lived on a farm in central New Brunswick.  Snow was a fact of life there.  Often it would come in October and not disappear until the first week of May.  The first thing I would do in the morning would be to shovel some snow.  Much of my day was built around moving snow around.  When a storm came, you cleaned just enough to get the roads passable. Then you improved things gradually until the next storm.

I suspect a lot of that will be happening in the area hit by this most recent blizzard.  Another storm is already on the way, and people will start wondering where they are going to put more snow.

I am starting to wonder what we are going to do with more rain.  We have had eight to ten inches of precipitation in the last thirty days and probably something on the order of sixty inches in the last one hundred and eighty days.

The rains are almost more impressive than the national snow depth maps.

One good thing about weather is that if you can just hang on, it will change.  Right now I am enjoying each ray of sunshine, and looking forward to seeing some decent temperatures by the middle of the month.  In my book, decent equals seventy degrees.

There is some solace in the fact that there was just a little ice on the edge of the gut instead of ice covering it, but what I want is a day when the temperature soars into the seventies and the warmth surrounds me.  We have seen plenty of winter days like that over the years, but they have been few and far between this year.

Let us hope for one soon.