Winter

Brrrr.

We're just a little cold here.  Today we started off around 9 degrees and we've topped out at 15.  Tonight we should be at 6.

Yes.

 Six. (If you like to measure things in Celsius, that's -14.444 degrees, according to the nice people at Google.)

Which is, in my book, bordering on unreasonably cold. But not quite cold enough to encourage teenage girls to wear mittens and hats.

I'm not complaining.  This is what January should be like here and I get spooked when the month fails to live up to my meteorological expectations. Plus, it's much colder in other places.  And it's sunny and clear here, even if it's cold.

Last month it was not sunny and clear.  It started off that way (probably), but around 2:00 one afternoon, the snow started coming.  By 5:00, we looked like this:

See the pumpkin in the corner?   Not anymore:




By morning, we were good and covered and it took us a few hours to dig ourselves out.




Actually, I did the shoveling.  The boss-man hopped in his big-old manly-man truck and plowed and plowed and plowed until the driveway was passable, and then he thought he would plow a little more.

The big-old manly-man truck thought otherwise.

We've had this truck for a few years and in that time we have come to realize that it has some independent notions about stopping and starting.  It is also not road-worthy, so it is not registered with the authorities.  This is not really a big deal since we use it only on our private property, except for that moment of thrilling lawlessness when we have to venture out into the public road to turn the thing around.  But it has, naturally, become our fear that the truck would suddenly decide to make an unscheduled stop while we were practicing our lawless ways.

And so it did.

But it didn't just stop in the road.  It, being a vehicle of independent and contrary ways, stopped across the street:



Of course.



In the hour before the tow truck came (impressively fast for a stormy morning), we learned (1) how to unhook the plow from the truck, which involves an unfortunate amount of scrabbling around on the dirty snow under the truck to hammer rusty pins out of sticky spots, but which had to be done before the truck could be towed away, and (2) that we have neighbors who are willing to spend that hour out in the snow with us, sorting out the plow removal, providing moral support, finding chains and trucks with which to haul the plow back up the driveway, and not laughing at us too much--at least not to our faces.

I think we'll be hiring someone else to do the plowing now.

The storm raised another important question:  What do the chickens do with all the snow?

The answer?  Not a whole lot.

While I was out with my shovel, I cleared a path to the coop and then, in a fit of industry that turned out to be entirely wasted, I shoveled the snow out of half of the run  so the chickens could come out and play.



Which just shows that after three and a half years of living with these birds, I haven't learned a whole lot.

They looked out the door



and they ate whatever snow they could reach







but they refused to come outside.  For days.  Even though the temperature was in the 20s and 30s and even though I shoveled a path for them. Fifteen degrees and wind, though?  Doesn't bother them at all.  Go figure.