After a day and a half of snow, our property now looks like a postcard, or possibly the lid of a chocolate box. And it continues to snow. Tomorrow it is supposed to have stopped snowing and we in theory shall not see more snow this week; rain has been predicted for Thursday.

The animals are bearing up dutifully under the weather conditions. The geese are loud, squawking and abrasive - in short, not much

new there. The cats are dubious about this, although Nibs finds it delightful to follow a farmer down to taking trash to the curb and picking up mail, leaving adorable kitty footprints in the wake of human footprints - and sometimes not in the wake of them, either. We are blessed with such loving companions as walk on four feet that seldom can be matched by humans, with their complexities and melodramas. In Nibs' life, as in the lives of our other cats, the truest mystery and potential dramas are those of the hunt and

whether tonight's bedtime will involve a tin of cat food pate or not. Kitty pawprints leave a mark wherever they go.

At the evening feeding, a snowstorm blew in, making two sets of hands more helpful than one. However, all animals were fed and watered, without too much in the way of difficulty. Morning may paint an interesting picture of the snow continues as it was then, unabated.