While Jay Peak, in it’s very own weather zone, is boasting snow (only 60 miles north of us) and Denver is getting another 30 inches on top of the coupla feet they got last week, poor little Mad River Glen (the reason we live in Vermont) is finally going to open this weekend with a minimal base and minimal snow on top of that. Most of the other resorts around here are suffereing as well, but now that the cold has set in at least they can confidently make snow. Mad River actually has some snow making equipment as well, but oh, how I hate skiing on that. There are about 2 inches of snow in our front yard and I just can’t take it any more. I’m going to put in my old tele “rock skis” and go ski around the yard, grab the mail and then get back to work. No point in going out into the woods as there’s never as much snow in there as there is out in the open. For that, I can’t even justify snow shoes, though flip flops would be pushing it….

There are some beautiful falls that I can get to from my backyard, though they are a little off the beaten path.

I finally brought my camera back there yesterday. It’s really hard to capture the full impact of the falls which are about 20 or 25 feet high, fall into a beautiful small pool of water and then go down a stream to meet a larger stream. So in addition to these pics, I took a short video. The high quality video is 24 MB, the low quality version is about 4MB.

Burlington’s airport (BTV) just turned on free wi-fi today. Yay. Here’s more from the Free Press

January 09, 2007
SQL Developer Demo & Discussion
Come see SQL Developer in action.  SQL Developer is Oracle’s FREE GUI PL/SQL Development tool.

www.gmoug.org

There’s some unusual white stuff falling out of the sky this morning. The air is thick with it. White fluffy little flakes like someone’s shaking a huge box of those old fashioned laundry flakes. The wierdest thing is that it is sticking to the ground which is now mostly white with little bldes of grass sticking up in it.

Wait – I think… could it be…we just haven’t seen it for so long here in Vermont.

Snow?

It’s pretty sad that it’s Dec 19th and there’s no real skiing yet. Poor Mad River Glen still hasn’t opened yet. The bigger places that can make snow have been struggling against the unusually warm weather. There was an article in the paper this weekend about the alternate activities the ski resorts are coming up with for people who made their reservations and just came up anyway.

cool!

I was supposed to fly to Seattle today (that’s a cross country trip for me) by way of Chicago O’Hare. O’Hare was closed yesterday with something like 400 flights cancelled because of the weather, so I was a little nervous about what might happen with a 7:30am flight out of Burlington, where we were also having nasty weather and a forecast of snow in the morning). So I changed my flights to Monday (United was letting travellers do this without penalties) and freed up my seats on today’s flights for some happy person stuck in Chicago.

I looked today on the United site and saw that both of my flights went without a hitch and on time. But, it was still a great thing that I happened to do this since our power went out at 6pm last night and didn’t come back on till 8am (very high winds and big nasty storm – trees down everywhere!). So I would never have been able to get my act together to get out the door at 6am this morning for a week long trip anyway.

Happily it was a nice day today so I got to spend it with my hubby doing errands (including finally replacing my 12 year old UGLY ski jacket!) and going for a nice walk out to some hidden falls in the forest behind our house. He had never seen them before and I had only seen them for the first time a week ago. I forgot to bring my camera though. (Next time, I promise, so I can share.) Becaue of all the rain in the past days, the streams and rivers around here are wild so the falls and the streams around it were amazing!

I LOVED this book. It is one of those that I found myself reading until 2 or 3am in the morning (and then sleeping late because of it). I won’t be going, but just thought I would share in case other locals read my blog but not the Free Press where I learned about this.

From a short walk today

Maples by our mailbox.

Looking down the road towards the valley.

Daisy (left) and Tasha (right).

A surprising discovery. This is a wasp hive that is about 1 1/2 feet tall. Luckily, nothing was buzzing around it so I could go up and take a picture!

 Vermont SQL Server User Group