He was the single dog I saw being walked down by the river this morning. Just me and his owner slogging past each other through a foot of snow, and this big black dog off the leash bounding around, shoving his nose into snowdrifts and throwing the snow in the air. We're having a major blizzard here, folks, and it's great. I figured my basketball practice/game this morning would be cancelled, though I didn't hear anything about it; but seeing as how the chances of the super being able to get in to unlock the gym were almost nil, I decided to head down to the river instead of up to the school.

It was early enough that the snow was still coming down hard, whipped sideways by a strong north wind. It fell in huge clumps and flakes, soft and fluffy and a foot deep except where it had piled into high drifts. Beyond the railing it vanished into olive-green water, and beyond about twenty yards the water vanished again into the swirling snow. The blank whiteness covering nearly everything made me able to see some things I'd never noticed before. The cast-iron arms of the benches, for example, are perfect circles. What with shadows and paving patterns, I hadn't really looked closely at the benches. And most of the trees are deciduous, but there's a curved rise planted with evergreens that stood out beautifully, now that snow covers the ornamental grasses and other plantings at their feet.

I wondered what the water birds do in a storm like this, and the answer seems to be: they float it out. The pair of mallards were close to shore, paddling north, and actually making headway against both the tide and the wind. A single brown duck bobbed farther out, alone. There was a little duck family drama yesterday involving two pairs of Gadwalls and another single brown duck that doesn't look exactly like them, to me, though I suppose it could be a female or a young male; but its profile seemed different. I couldn't find any other ducks in Sibley's that it might be, though. Anyway, it kept swimming near the four of them as they floated in a loose flock. They never chased it away but they didn't make any effort to incorporate it and when two of them swam one way and two another, this lone duck swam off with one pair but they seemed singularly uninterested. Later I saw both pairs and not the loner, so I wonder if he got run off, and if that was he this morning.

Farther south, a huge flock of seagulls -- I mean like fifty or sixty, like every gull who works this part of the river -- floated together, not close enough to protect each other from the wind, but all on more or less the same stretch of water. And in the middle of that flock, another brown duck; maybe two, I couldn't see clearly. I surmise there's some fancy stuff happening with the current in that spot that keeps the water calmer than the surrounding areas, and each gull (and duck) picked it individually for that reason.

As I write this, we're up to something like 14" and it's still snowing. Whee.