Unpredictable weather extremes.

Shoveling snow while rain is pouring down, and the snow sublimates due to the temperature is one of the more surreal experiences I've had recently. Especially after multiple days of below zer temperatures.

Unfortunately with the snowblower out of commission, and out for repair right now it was a purely shovel job. With a few inches of snow, almost an inch of ice, and rain it was heavy work. This is definitely an example of me not injury managing well enough, because I actually wasn't able to complete shoveling the whole driveway.  As you can see on the Right since I figured out I wasn't going to be able to do the whole thing, I shoveled down as far as I could to the snow/ice mix that wasn't going to move. I got tire tracks, and then did a ladder pattern with a "cross bar" every 10 - 15 feet or so. I figured that gets things down as the melt happens. Now, the ladder pattern is sheets of black ice, and the parts in between are thick sheets of heavy ice with a bit of crunch to it. Wintery mix after serious snow is one of the worst types of weather in the world, but it can be pretty.

The animals aren't a fan of this kind of weird weather despite the warmer temperatures. The indignity of the rain, and difficulty of moving around meant that even the poultry didn't want to go anywhere. For some reason the turkey didn't go under shelter, and just hung out in the rain, so so he was soaked by dusk. Fortunately she's just fine.

Over the weekend though, it was really cold. My concerns about bitter, and breath stealing cold were well placed. During the day was awfully cold, and at night was unreasonably cold. Even so the Critter REALLY wanted to go outside. We brought him out when it was warm enough he could spend a few minutes outside, and he as usual loved it. He gets along with the poultry well enough they came to visit him despite the temperatures that mostly had them sitting in their coop trying to be warm. 

Speaking of being warm, we ended up relying on the wood stove over the weekend, and spending the entire weekend with it burning, and burning hot. We're treating it more like a fire place, and mostly burning with the door with the cracked glass open. Of course with the damaged stove there's no close the door and walk away with it going hot the way we can with it working properly so I spent a lot of the weekend rooted to the wood stove. Overnight Sunday into Monday where it was bitterly cold to an unreasonable degree, I let the fire go out instead of sleeping downstairs on the floor, and we ended up paying for it. The oil heat for the first floor only froze up, and wasn't working at all. It took most of Monday having the fire burning hot enough to get the house close to 80 to get the heat working by unfreezing the feeder pipe. At least we didn't end up with cracked pipes. That's why I ended up not posting Monday, between fire tending and shoveling, I was completely worn out, but at least I was warm!