Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 All right, I admit it, I am a numbers nerd.   Seriously.  Many long years ago when I was living at home with my parents, my father worked down the hallway from an in-house print shop.  Some of their printing was outsourced, some of it was done in house.  And some of their printers had time and ... well, ideas.   I guess someone, somewhere, decided producing blank pads of paper was a good idea.  But they seemed to have a real problem with size.  Dad came home with these pads of paper which were easily 15 x 20 inches, and a good 3/4" of an inch thick.  And my favorite thing to do was to start up in the upper left corner with a random number.  I'd double it.  And continue right down that edge, then start a second column, and so on, and so on.  Until I filled the page with a number that was, sometimes, 25 or more digits long.  Mind you, I didn't have anyone to check my work, but it was ... well, I thought it was fun...

 While it may beat the alternative, the current situation around here is waiting to see what winter is going to do.   I've been here for 60 winters now, and I have noticed that there are patterns.  Not the sort that the more knowledgeable weather forecasters (and others) talk about.  What I've seen tends to carry through, which pretty much is the way the winter weather starts tends to define the entire winter.   Some of that is weather, and most of it is the after-effects of the weather.  Last year started slow but big - and ended up with our third-snowiest winter, ending up with just short of eight feet of snow.  We tend to average five feet a year, but before you snort and laugh, that does not mean every flat surface is covered to that depth.   In a typical winter, we start with some snow, then some melts, more snow arrives, and snow, as you know if you know, is mostly air.  That's right.  Snowflakes are relatively flat,...

 I've been here, just haven't been particularly inspired - or had the free time - to get here and accomplish anything. It's been a month.  We celebrated my birthday, my daughter's, our 33rd anniversary, and a few other things.  Last night we went out for dinner with the whole family for my son's birthday, which is still up ahead, calendar wise. Weather-wise around here we've gone from upper eighties to snow - yeah, that happens this time of year.  Curiously - or perhaps it was just freakish timing, our snowfall was literally on Halloween.  Yeah, I know, I lived through the blizzard we got 32 years ago on Halloween and after.  I had not yet started this writing thing, but we sure as hell got nailed by a heck of a lot of snow.  The history books do a better time of recording the whole process.  I do remember it was a day where, at work - it was a Thursday - I spent in meetings, mostly about benefits and the direction they wanted the company benefits...