> This ought to make it obvious that I am imagining snow season as being like our rainy season, in the sense that for several months of the year you can almost guarantee that in any given 24-hour period it will rain at least once. Maybe heavily, maybe lightly, and for various durations, but basically you assume there will be rain. Is snowfall like this in New England? Or is it more like "one big snowfall, then it sits around for weeks until the next big snowfall"?

In California and from what I've seen of New England, snow comes in cycles but rain can stay for a while. When I've been in the Sierra Nevada and from my two winter stays in New England (the last being the recent Christmas holiday where we got a white Christmas!), it will often snow for a day or two and then be clear for a while and then the snow might return with another storm. For example, it snowed almost all day on Christmas and through much of the night, putting down 1.5 feet of snow to be shoveled and cleared the next day. The next several days were clear of precipitation until we got some small flurries on Monday. We left on Wednesday (a week after Christmas) and they got freezing rain and snow on Thursday and a big dump of snow again on Saturday. This wasn't much different from our visit two years ago. In the Sierras, it is often the same but the storms seem to drop more snow at once (the Sierra Dump) and they can get several feet out of one storm and the storms seem to last longer. Northern California had a couple weeks where it rained just about every day (a little odd for December but not unknown) and this meant a lot of snow in the mountains. The ski resorts are happy about this. The people who lost power for a week due to mudslides and flooding rivers weren't so happy. Why people buy houses on hillsides, cliffs and in flood zones still perplexes me.

Of course, there are always exceptions and I'm not one about to tell the weather what it does because it will sooner prove me wrong because it is a cocky one. We've had Januarys here in California where it rained all but one or two days of the month and others where it was quite balmy. And southern California is a different beast altogether.

The snow was great and fun and not a problem if you didn't have to drive in it while it was snowing.

We even built an igloo. If only I hadn't wrenched my back shoveling the driveway.

Ferrick