It was 0° (-18° C) this morning when I let the dogs out of Widget's House, and I took this photo shortly thereafter. The sun was finally coming up over the ridge to the east of us and beginning to light up Ovando Mountain behind us. At this point, we're all just waiting for the warmth of the rays to arrive — and when it's this cold, the sun can't get here fast enough. It's been snowing for two days and then it turned into a minor blizzard yesterday afternoon and continued through much of the night. That's why blind Mitch is sitting there off to the right, wondering why I haven't put him in his usual yard yet. Answer: Because the gate to his yard was snowbound and needed to be dug out. Since I was going to be putting them back inside pretty soon, I decided not to bother digging it out.
I had spent about 5 hours last Saturday on the tractor plowing us out from the last winter storm, so I wasn't too happy to realize I'd be spending a good part of today doing the same thing all over again.
For those of you down South "enjoying" your cold snap in the 20s and 30s, we'd love to have some of that weather back!
Speaking of weather, long-time blog readers know I'm something of a weather geek. Well, Santa brought me a new wireless weather station for Christmas, since my other one died in November after eight years of service. That was just as well: The old one from Lacrosse Technology was programmed to go "off-line" once the temperature dropped past 20 below zero (-29 C), an annoying limitation. The new one, from Davis Instruments, registers temperatures down to 40 below zero. (That's -40 C … isn't it odd that Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same when it gets to that temperature?).
Even better, my new weather station uploads our actual weather data to a custom Web page on a site run by Davis Instruments called Weatherlink.com. The Rolling Dog Ranch weather page is here: http://www.weatherlink.com/user/smithmarker/
So if you want to know what the weather is at the ranch at any time, you can bookmark that link.
Note there is no snow gauge, just a rain gauge listed on that page, and we're not exactly sure how that's going to work when it's plugged up with snow this time of year!
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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