Winter in Vermont

My brother Vance has a fair amount of acreage and a cabin in SE Vermont. I have only visited once, but it's very nice.He has found that he can make pretty good money selling firewood. I gather that he gets some tax breaks for running productive forestry land, and I gather that firewood fits that description. This year's fuel prices are nothing like worst case forecasts from last summer, not even as bad as they were last winter. But I imagine that heating with wood, for those that can use that option, is still less expensive than heating with fuel oil or natural gas.The ice storm in mid-December was national news, but here in Oregon we mostly heard about New Hampshire and Maine. I assumed he'd seen some ice but this is worse than I'd imagined. On the other hand, while the trees are bowed, I'm not seeing too many limbs actually broken. We get these kind of conditions here every couple of years; it's quite beautiful, but treacherous to try to go anywhere. Good weather to stay indoors. I haven't seen this pond before. Very pretty. When Vance tried to describe this picture, I had no real image of what he meant, but he actually did a very good job of portraying this as remeniscent of fractiles, the Mandelbrot set particularly. I'm sure that someone can interpret a great deal from that odd pattern of open and frozen pond surface. I can only see evidence that there's a lot more going on here than one might assume from the placid, apparently static scene.