A sunny, beautiful day to follow the snow of the past few days. It's beginning to look a lot mor like Myoko these days; the roadside snow walls are growing, and the small trees are disappearing into the snowpack.

It's still snowing like mad, I'm still going out to play (and the snow thrower is even more on the fritz), but here is your timely report for Friday, January 4.

There are days when you will say, our correspondent is an irresponsible, lazy lout for not getting a report up in a timely fashion. And there are days when you will say, well, yeah, of course, I completely understand.

That great big snowstorm that triggered heavy snow warnings all across Niigata is... missing. Some very nice, light snow fell overnight, but less than 10cm of it (the resorts are reporting a bit more, and there may have been more snow up high).

Happy New (calendar) Year, and continuation of the ski season! Things really get going from now on.

The rain has indeed turned to snow--about 10cm by the backyard ruler. A big change in temperature over one day, too; yesterday's high was nearly 8C, where it's now around -2C.

The rain has arrived; a light misting in the early morning, getting a little heavier at the time of this report.

The threatened rain for today hasn't materialized--yet. Things started cloudy, turned to perfect blue skies, and now things are clouding up again, with some fog appearing up the hill.

I promised myself that I'd get out an early report--which is good, except that the official snow reports haven't been updated locally yet (except for Ikenotaira).

Such a nice day; so busy in the morning. All that blowing, accumulating snow was there sparkling in the early morning sunlight (and an early-morning ski lesson meant I didn't get my time at the desk).

It's a blizzard out there this morning, with strong winds and pretty good snowfall. It's hard to tell how much has actually fallen, with a lot of drifting of snow around buildings and cars.

Merry/Happy Christmas everyone! A really nice day in Myoko, after the good snows of yesterday. Clear to the east, still some snow falling high up over the mountains.

The snow is really falling today; a pretty solid wet base from the rain and wet snow yesterday slowly turned to some really nice powder overnight, and it's still falling pretty heavily at midday.

Late report today, but not a great weather day today, not a great weather report at the moment, but things will be looking up tomorrow. I firmly believe.