In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that we haven't gotten out there into the snow just yet.  It took us most of today to dig out our sidewalk and then we settled down for a warm nap.  So this report isn't going to show lots of pictures of large mounds of snow.  Instead, we rolled around town late yesterday afternoon, and took some cool shots, discovered something interesting, and saw something really weird.  If we get dug out, we'll go around and take some more shots -- otherwise, we'll wait for the next blizzard :-)

This was going to be a good storm -- you could tell because the snow that fell wasn't melting when it hit the ground.  It was sticking right away, or swirling around on the roads.  A lot of folks were out as the storm was starting -- and, boy, was it cold.  There was a wicked icy wind whipping down Jamaica Avenue. 

As the snow started to fall faster, people began to move faster themselves.  There's something about an approaching snowstorm that makes people think as if they're going to be snowed in for a week.  They run out and stock up on Milk, Bread, and Eggs.  Some of these folks might not even like Milk, Bread, and Eggs.  But when they see a few snowflakes falling, they buy enough for 2 weeks.     

Next we headed up towards the park.  There's something really nice about the park at the start of a snowstorm.  The snow falls and gathers in little patches, and you end up with a nice contrast between the bright snow and the dark skies.

There's also a nice contrast to the Avenue.  On the Avenue, traffic is heavy and people are rushing in and out of stores.  The Park, on the other hand, is completely empty.  Forest Park Drive was deserted, as was the Golf Course (below right). 

These are the same steps we did a whole report on back in May.

Here's the same steps in greener days!  Looks good, right?  Well, it'll all be green again soon enough.  But between now and then we'll have a few more days like yesterday, so it's good to look at a nice sunny day once in a while to cheer yourself up.   

Now, earlier in this report we mentioned how Forest Park was deserted.  That's not entirely true.  As we were driving along towards the Seuffert Bandshell. we saw a huge flock of black birds.  It was a swarm of them, covering the trees and the road. 

They certainly weren't afraid of us, and didn't fly away as we slowly rolled towards them.  Admittedly, we know next to nothing about birds, so we'll rely on one of our readers to tell us about these ones.  We've been in that park a lot in our lives, and never seen a heavy flock like this.  Maybe the coming blizzard freaked them out.

Some more shots of the birds.  With the dark skies, and the deserted park, when we rolled across these birds, it felt a little creepy . . . we felt like we were in a Hitchcock movie!  

Here is some video from yesterday -- including neat footage of these birds in flight. 

Here's a bunch of little bird footprints in the snow.  The ground was covered with these footprints.  Wait, do you call them footprints?  Or is it clawprints?  Either way, here they are.... 

This was a surprise -- there's a fence around the whole bandshell area.  At some previous meetings of the Woodhaven Residents Block Association, there had been some discussion about putting a permanent fence around this area.  But this is just very temporary fencing, probably because they are going to do some construction this winter.  I think they're be ripping out the benches and putting in new ones (although far fewer benches, from what we've heard).