Jan. 8-14, 2024

 

Weather | 1/8, cloudy to snow, 27°, 35° | 1/9, 10" snow, 1.10" precip., 29°, 33° | 1/10, p. cloudy, 19°, 32° | 1/11, sunny to cloudy, 25°, 35° | 1/12, rain to snow, 0.39" moisture, 31°, 11° | 1/13, snow, 0.04" moisture, 5°, 8° | 1/14, mostly cloudy, -20°, -4° | 

• Monday, 1/8: Hickory Firewood to Snow
  
  • I felled the tree that Mary spotted yesterday. It was a hickory, not an ash tree. I cut it up into firewood chunks. Mary and I both loaded the wood into the trailer and hauled it home, then we split the big pieces and stacked this wood into the woodshed, reaching a chin-high level at the top of the stacked firewood.
    
  • Rain started in at 2:30 p.m., quickly shifting to snow by 3:15. After evening chores, I stuck a yard stick in the snow and it was 3.5 inches deep. This was heavy, wet snow.
    
  • After dark, we watched the rest of Season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
    

• Tuesday, 1/9: Power Goes Out
  
  • Through the night, the snow really piled up. All of the cedar boughs were bent over. Snow smashed our forsythia bush to the ground.
    
  • The electric power flicked off and on. It went completely off at 11 a.m. Strong winds were bouncing power lines loaded with caked-on snow.
  • I called the Lewis County Rural Electric Cooperative (REC) office to report our outage. Of their total 7800 customers, a bit over 3800 were without power.
    
  • I labeled the blackberry wine and found home in the coolers in the upstairs north bedroom for 25 more bottles.
  • I trudged the filled garbage can down the lane using the plastic toboggan, which was quite a chore in the deep snow. An evening measurement showed we had 9.5 inches of snow. 
    
  • Mary dug out eight pillar candles and lit them on the kitchen table. She heated up some chili dinner and tea water on top of the woodstove. It worked very well.
    
  • We played a card game of Rummy by candlelight and drank a bottle of spiced apple wine, along with several cups of Red Rose tea. The wine was very yummy, even though it was bottled recently on Nov. 20th. Mary says you can really taste the cloves, and that it hit the spot. Mary and I went back and forth as game leader. Ultimately, Mary won.
  • We noticed all of the neighbor's lights on at 11 p.m., but there was no electricity at our house.
    
  • Mary covered our two chest freezers with sleeping bags and blankets.
  • We were in bed by a few minutes after midnight.
    

• Wednesday, 1/10: Power Restored
  
  • We still were without power this morning. There was another half inch of snow on the ground.
  • While walking pups down the lane, we watched six deer run across the snow-filled driveway. Snow doesn't slow down these long-legged critters.
  • I walked to the end of the lane and saw one of the two electric lines that feeds us with electricity on the ground between the gravel road and the first pole going to our house. I also noticed where a truck turned around in our driveway and there were boot tracks walking in from the gravel road where someone looked at our downed electrical wire. At that point I knew the electric co-op recognized our issue.
    
  • Since cell phone batteries dropping off when I was trying to communicate with the electric people, I dug the pickup out from under the snow, started it, and charged our cell phone batteries.
  • Meanwhile, after Mary put refrigerator items in two coolers outside on the front porch and opened the chicken coop, she started shoveling snow off the at end of our lane in order to give the mail lady access to our mailbox and to assist electric co-op trucks in getting to the downed wire.
    
  • I joined Mary partway through her digging and we shoveled snow until we were parallel to the first electric power pole going to our house.
    
  • While eating a midday meal of cheese on crackers, David Marquette showed up on a dilapidated 2N Ford tractor to see how we were doing. He's such a mess...almost subhuman. He burned down the barn at his place by first putting an outdoor wood stove in it, then sticking a bucket of tar right next to the hot stove.
    
  • In the middle of David babbling his B.S., an electric co-op lineman showed up to unplug our electric meter and to make sure we weren't running a generator. I grabbed my coat and followed him back down the lane, discovering that David made a big mess of our driveway by skittering back and forth getting through the snow with his winky tractor. The worker I followed pulled the downed electric line up to near the gravel road to repair it. They added four splices and a fresh 23 feet of cable to a badly broken wire. Two of the bucket trucks were from an electric co-op in Columbia, MO, and a third truck was local. One of the workers said he got four hours of sleep early this morning. He also said we were the last outage that they fixed in Lewis County. 
  • Power was back on at 3 p.m. and we were super happy. We take electricity for granted until we are without it. We only lost a partial quart bag of blackberries that were in the refrigerator freezer...not bad.
    
  • Bill texted that his next visit to us is Feb. 17-20.
    

• Thursday, 1/11: Shoveling the Lane
  
  • Below zero temperatures are predicted for us in a few days, so top priorities are to wrap up any job hindered by subzero weather.
    
  • I tightened up the chicken coop. Using strips of old chicken feed bags, I filled cracks around the bottoms of south-facing windows and a crack in the west wall of the coop. I cut bag parts that covered both northern coop windows. Finally, I put old dog bed stuffing to the inside of the north chicken door and screwed on an inside partition to seal air from entering that area. I also hung an electric heater up in the center of the coop. Mary said she could feel the difference when entering the chicken coop this evening.
    
  • While I was working in the coop, Mary started behind the vehicles and headed south, shoveling the lane. The main concern was to knock down the massive amount of snow in the center of the lane prior to tonight's freezing rain and upcoming subzero temperatures. She was at the halfway point when I started helping. She took a break and did several evening chores while I continued where she left off. Before darkness fell, we finished shoveling what amounted to three-fourths of our quarter-mile lane.
  • While shoveling, I noticed ice falling off trees surrounding Bluegill Pond and tinkling as it hit the ground. A flock of snow geese flew overhead and landed in the east field. Mary and I watched two trumpeter swans land in the pond across the gravel road from us. When we checked for mail, they flew away.
    
  • We had all kinds of muscle aches and pains. Mary commented on how she was obviously not in shape. I said there aren't too many folks our age that can shovel 10 inches of snow from a quarter-mile lane in two days.
  • Mary made a large batch of chicken noodle soup that was exceptional.
  • We watched the 2022 movie, Marry Me.
    

• Friday, 1/12: All Firewood Split
  
  • Light snow fell throughout the day...a few times it was heavy snow (see photo, below). Also, strong northwest winds blew. The high of 31 was in the morning. Temperatures fell throughout the day.
    
  • Mary and I split the rest of the red oak firewood. At first, we thought it wasn't much, but it took most of the day to split it and the resulting stack of today's split wood is about three feet high and eight feet long. I'll move it to the inside north wall of the machine shed and stack it in criss-cross stacks when I have an inclination and time. A few of the whole trunk pieces of this oak tree were tough to split. Several unsplittable pieces went in the outdoor fire pile for later meat roastings.
  • Around 4 p.m., Mary kicked on the heater in the chicken coop. Chickens were inside all day. The coop is warmer and the birds are happy. We even got three eggs from them, today.
    
  • There are tons of bunny tracks over the snow.
    
  • Winds really kicked up after dark for a couple hours. On a positive note, there's a good draft pulling smoke out of the woodstove.
  • We tried to read after eating more homemade chicken noodle soup for supper, but heavy eyelids make reading difficult. We really need a day of rest.

  

  Heavy snow falling as seen through west living room window.

• Saturday, 1/13: An Unexpected Visitor!
  
  • When I walked into the machine shed this morning, I heard a clicking noise I thought was coming from the roof. It was from an immature turkey vulture walking on the tractor's hood. We think it swooped into the machine shed during a morning snow flurry to get in out of the weather. I walked into the machine shed a couple times during the day to see it on a folded up canvas tarp on the old Jubilee Ford tractor with its head tucked under a wing. When we started evening chores, I found it on the ground near the northeast side of the machine shed. It flew out of the open east end of the building and flew off to the southwest. By this time of year, vultures are way south of here.
    
  • I cut down the foam from an old tent trailer camper seat pad to fit into the 23" x 9" hole that is the south chicken door. The wooden chicken door is slightly warped, leaving an air gap when closed. I stuffed the new sized foam pad back into the denim cover, then stuffed the pad into the hole from the inside, thereby sealing air gaps into the chicken coop.
    
  • The chickens were kept in the coop all day with the heater on, which was necessary. A strong west wind blew all day. The chickens seemed fine in the coop.
  • During evening chores, we noticed several flocks of Canada geese flying southeast.
    
  • After dark, we watched four episodes to finish the 1997 PBS documentary, Liberty! The American Revolution.
  • The outside temperature sank substantially. By bedtime, -14 registered on the thermometer. We walked to the coop and switched the heater in the coop to a higher setting.
    

• Sunday, 1/14: Coldest We've Witnessed in Missouri
  
  • We saw -20 as an outside temperature this morning, which is the coldest we've seen since we moved to Missouri in 2009.
  • Mom experienced a similar circumstance. It was -37 in Circle, MT, this morning. In the years we lived there, the coldest we saw was in the -31 or -32 range.
    
  • This is not a warm house, especially on the floors, when it's cold outside. I spent time online, today, investigating flooring ideas. Black bunny boots were on my feet all day.
    
  • I fixed up a batch of waffles for our noon meal.
  • While doing evening chores, we watched two deer browsing on twigs near the McIntosh apple tree in the north yard. One was a healthy buck that still had antlers.
  • I checked for mail, in case mail was delivered late yesterday. It wasn't. There were two sets of deer tracks crossing the lane and small wild canine tracks, which I think belonged to a fox. Dog tracks were at the end of the lane. I wore my down parka with the coyote fur ruff pulled forward. It works perfect against a stiff northwest wind.
  • We read books into the night. Both Mary and I have about 4-5 books we're each reading. I also watched NHL game highlights and a recap of the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Miami Dolphins NFL Wild Card game played last night, in which the Chiefs won. GO CHIEFS!!!