This morning was like a particularly disappointing Christmas morning. The kind where you've asked Santa for a new bike and G.I. Joe and find shirts and trousers instead. And your stocking's stuffed with tangerines to boot.

Since Valentine's Day we've been buried under two feet of snow and the cold's been relentless. But yesterday the weather reports called for temperatures in the forties and torrential rains overnight. I went to bed with visions of patches of lawn dancing in my head.

When I got up and peered eagerly out the window, the morning light revealed the usual unrelieved expanse of white. It did rain and presumably the snow pack was reduced somewhat but it's hard to tell. The stump of the pine we had cut down last year hasn't even emerged into view.

Since Mary and I don't ski, we've kept busy writing. We finished a story for an anthology, of which I will say more when everything is official, and now we are laboring over the final touches to Seven For A Secret. So at least it will not be, as the rhyme has it, "...a secret never to be told."