Negative ten
I'm sure you're all sick
of hearing about the weather, but cold continues to keep my interest,
especially when I wake up to -10 degrees Fahrenheit. That's frigid
enough that I can only barely do my morning chores, and that the
chickens don't even want to leave their warm roosts for fresh food and
water. I skip Lucy's walk, and only go out to see how frozen the
creek is in the afternoon, when the sun has brought temperatures up to
22.
We don't go outside to
work when it's this cold, but there are projects that require our
attention. The most pressing is drinking water. That line
usually stays thawed even when the wash-water line freezes,
but the drinking-water line froze up a week ago Monday. Since
then, we've been going through our stored water, and finally came to an
end, just one day before Mom promised me five more cleaned-out milk jugs
full of water.
The solution? I
tried melting snow, which is feasible, if time-consuming. The
three inches that fell Tuesday night are so fluffy, though, that each
gallon only melts down into a single cup of water. Instead, Mark
had the bright idea of ladling out the gallon of water that settled in
the bottom of our drinking water tank --- we could have poured it, but then would have had to let the sediment settle out again.
After tiding over our
thirst, we turned back to sedentary tasks. The great thing about a
cold, snowy winter is that it gives me plenty of guilt-free time to
write!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Hi Anna and Mark,
Just so you know. The past several days I see old web pages when I first access your website.
I run Linux, so I can easily run different web browsers. When I first looked at your website today using qupzilla (latest), I see the webpage from 1-23-2014 ??!! When I look at it using Seamonkey 2.23 (latest), I see the pages you added today.
I am not sure who is doing what to your web image?
But I thought you would like to know that your ISP are modifying what they send or do not send to your users.
An interesting feature of qupzilla, probably worth your checking out, is that it allows you to easily see the various java script and other files "added" to what you publish. Their timestamps, etc.
Happiness is no longer being a Microsoft addict :).
warm regards to you both, John
Are your drinking water lines insulated? It would be a good idea to do that if they are exposed...
Edith