Anti freeze

Woke up yesterday to a white world. I knew it would be. It started snowing before I went to bed the night before. What I didn’t realise was quite how cold it was.

Looked out the kitchen window to see a poor hummingbird trying to get some sustenance from a frozen feeder. Mixed up a new batch of sugar water and put it on the stove to heat through. Opened the back door to get the feeder and saw exactly how far away from the house Maisie had ventured earlier in the morning.

Don’t blame her. Fucking brr.

Thought it might help to thaw out the frozen water in the feeder if I ran some hottish water over it. Plenty of water half an hour earlier when I’d washed my face, brushed my teeth and (thankfully as it turns out) flushed the toilet. Turned the tap on. Barely a trickle came out. Bollocks.

Went down to the crawl space to switch the water source from the well to the cistern. (Yikes! Looks like Ratty had a party in there. Argh. Fortunately no sight of him.) Came back up and turned the tap on again. Still a trickle that soon trickled out. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. Usually it takes three or four days of frigid weather to freeze the pipes. This time it took about 16 hours. (Well, it did go down to -12 in the night.) Crap. Speaking of which, I was really glad at that point that the toilet had been flushed before the freeze. And that I’d had a shower the previous night. Guess it will be a bucket bath tonight.

It was time for a wintry walk with Joe and Georgie. 

Yeah, it looks pretty, but, holy brass monkeys, Batman. It was fucking cold. We’d only gone a couple of hundred feet before we decided to opt for the shortest option on this particular trail. Definitely thermal underwear weather. Not that I have any, but a pair of tights under my jeans wouldn’t have hurt. Georgie, of course, didn’t care. 

Came home, got a fre going in the woodstove. The heat pump doesn’t really cut it when it gets this cold. Also, I needed to start melting and heating water from the in-case-of-power-failure buckets on the deck. Last year when the pipes froze there was a ton of snow outside to scoop and melt. Right now not so much.

Get up this morning, try the tap in the bathroom. Oh, ha, ha. Not a chance. Okay, at least I can use last night’s dishwater to flush the toilet today. 

Check weather forecast. Temperature today is -7, forecast to go up to -1 tomorrow and then 2 degrees Monday. It’s not going to warm up in any meaningful way until Friday. Oh, goodie.

Note to self: For fuck’s sake, when the weather is better, have as serious look at how to improve insulation of the pipes. This is crazy.