Welcome to a good old-fashioned Maine winter! When you saw that postcard of the old farmhouse with the white picket fence and the beautiful trees with snow on them you instantly thought you'd like to live here.

Welcome to reality, the snow is knee high to a young giraffe, you've been stranded for two days and almost out of food and the power just went out.

You don't know it but the guy who is supposed to plow you out has 200 other people to plow first, the power won't be on for another 48 hours, the temperature is way below zero, Stop & Rob is closed because of the storm, and an even bigger storm is brewing off the coast.

You could light your kerosene heater if you had one but last winter was so mild you bought a new lawnmower, instead; bad move!

What we do in Boothbay is let the grass grow all summer and burn it in December, saves time, money and energy.

Maybe you can start your lawnmower and put it in the living room and have everyone gather in a circle, like a wagon train. I would remove the rug first and watch out for the fumes, OSHA wouldn't like you.

Someone once said, "It ain't over 'til the fat man swings." He was right. I've been trout fishing in May and seen enough snow to make an escaped convict want to go back to the pen.

Cheer up -- The pot-hole season is right around the corner. That's the time of year when you see mufflers, hub caps and a few bumpers on the side of the road. You will also see a lot of BUMP signs; don't ignore these. Last fall the water district had a bad leak on Route 96. After a backhoe had dug down four feet they struck metal; ayah, it was the top of a Volkswagen bus. Must have been there quite a while, last registered in 1986.

Next we have what out-of-staters call summer. It's that time of year when you paint your boat and get ready for some good times. Trouble is by the time you get it painted and get your mooring ready, it's spitting snow; isn't that nice.

We used to have a nuclear plant in Wiscasset called Maine Yankee but it has gone out of commission. Too bad, every few days they used to release radiation into the atmosphere and the snow would melt quicker than last night's ice cream. They don't call it meltdown for nothing.

If you really feel good and want to know how bad feels, take a trip to Brunswick, better take a big lunch on this trip, especially in July.

You've probably heard the saying, "You can't get there from here." Well, you're here, but you might be on Social Security by the time you arrive there.

Around here we go straight from black flies and tourists to ice and snow. Sometimes in between we have a hurry-up, that's when you work like hell to get your lawn chairs and summer stuff in before it snows or you shovel your lawn off so the grass will grow. Seasons change quick around here.

Another thing that I should mention is the town road crew. They don't plow until the storm is over, that's because a few years ago the road foreman told his crew to keep up with the storm. They did, the last time we saw them was two years ago, seems the storm went out to sea and the only sign of them was a plow track going overboard at the Ocean Point launching ramp.

This area is on a peninsula. I think that's Liberian for "End of the world," one way in and one way out. That's it folks, they even turned our only airfield into a water treatment plant.

I don't want to tell you about our rainy season as it might make you want to move back where you came from. Oh well, it only lasts from May until October. You know all those stonewalls you see, they aren't for looks, they are Downeast sandbags.

They had to close school for a week last month, something about the outhouses were getting full. We have a small mall also but when you go, plan ahead, only six people at a time are allowed. I've seen people grow old while they wait.

All in all it's not a bad place to live. We don't have tornados, hurricanes or many floods and we do have most of your modern conveniences. Television is pretty good if the station can stop their antenna from blowing over, the roads will be better if we can ever afford the cold patch, and the hospital will open soon if they can find someone that knows how to build it!

Welcome to the region and I hope you enjoy. I'll be leaving next week, bought a little farm that overlooks the ocean in Arizona, it's not much but I won't have to lug them heavy sandbags around anymore.