Winter Blizzard

I was hoping that the heavy snows would wait until after my last road trip of the year. I am supposed to leave Friday to go to Duluth to meet with the photographer, who is taking all the pictures for the new agate book. The forecast for Friday doesn't look too bad, but in the mean time we are getting hit big time. Almost all the schools in the U.P. are closed. We've received 6 inches or so, on top of the foot we already had, with another 6-12 inches expected. Winds are blowing it around, too. I just finished shovelling a 4 foot drift in front of my garage door.

If the roads are still horrible on Friday, I may leave Saturday instead -- or postpone to next week.

Things are progressing on the book. The data base is completed and data sorted by category. In total, I have 101 reference sources and 720 sectors of information. I uniquely numbered each segment of information and saved the data without the correlating reference sources. I must admit that I am biased toward a few of the reference sources. It is best that I don't know which segment of information goes with which reference source. I'm now cutting and pasting the information segments into the table of contents sections. It is a tedious process, but I'm one third done. Then, I'll start writing.

Since I've been working all day every day, I decided to take a long snowshoe yesterday with my friend, Kim. We started at Sable Visitor's Center, snowshoed across the dunes, and then cut over toward Sable Falls. I must admit that after nearly 2 1/2 hours trudging through the deep snow, I was glad to get back to the car. It was beautiful, though. Glad I did it. Below are a few of the photos.