Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

Well folks, there you have it. The first snow of the season. That was the state of affairs at about 9am this morning. Now, an hour later, there's basically no indication of the dastardly white stuff at all, which is good, in my opinion, but just serves to make its permanency during the winter all that more brutal and foreboding.

Also, you can now see what my parent's house looks like from the front [south]. Quite the contrast in comparison to the north elevation. The small, glassed in projection in the very front of the house is the solarium--the heart of our passive heating system. It used to have 4 large skylights, but those were taken out in an attempt to fix a leaky solarium roof [which, we found out the expensive way, had nothing to do with the skylights]. Even without the skylights, the house is oriented in such a way that the south elevation--the solarium in particular--achieves the maximum amount of incident solar radiation in the winter. It can be well below freezing outside on a sunny day, but well over 80F [27C] or higher in the solarium. It sits between the half basement and the 2nd floor and is connected to the former by a small window in the hobby room and a pair of large french doors upstairs. When those are open, the hot air naturally ciculates from the solarium to the upstairs and cooler air is drawn from the basement. Of course, it's still a 3600 sq.ft. monster house [bigger now that we've added the adjoining garage, entry room, and loft] but I'm still really proud of that central bit of ecology designed into a home built in 1984!

In other news, I'll be meeting with the Director of the Landscape Architecture dept. at a local engineering firm at some point next week. Keep your fingers crossed!

Holy crap... It's now almost 11am and a very strong wind has kicked up and there is a great deal increasingly larger and larger flakes of light snow being driven nearly parallel to the ground... *sigh* It's quite the sight to behold, but I hate Michigan winters.