Okay, I’m being only slightly sarcastic with that title… ;-)

The cold snap continues, and is supposed to continue for about a week.

The above picture was taken a few days ago, on the last milder day, just before we headed into town to get to the pharmacy before the weather got worse. The camera automatically cleans up the image, so the visibility was actually poorer than it appears in the picture.

Right now, we have a cloudless sky. It’s bright and clear and…

… bitterly cold.

I took that screen cap less than 10 minutes ago. At those temperatures, even a light breeze brings the windchill down to dangerous levels.When my daughter went out last night to give the cats more warm water, the heated water bowl already had ice around the edges. By this morning, it was completely iced over. (The cats even had frost on their faces!) There was still liquid water on the bottom, but no way for the cats to get at it. Which means, at some point before next winter, we should make sure to find and buy a proper heated water bowl. We might not be able to find them locally; while I’m finding them online, the physical stores don’t seem to stock them anymore. I’d really prefer to support our local stores over buying online, if I can, but we may not have a choice. Ah, well.

I don’t know of the weather has anything to do with it, but I have been having problems with our internet. Not we, necessarily. Me. Since moving my office to the master bedroom, and my husband’s hospital bed to what used to be my office, my desktop is no longer hard wired to the router. So I’m back on WiFi, which is what I was doing before our move. For some reason, I have been losing my WiFi on my desktop – but not on my phone. Sometimes, we all lose our internet and it’s just a matter resetting the router to get it back. When I lose it on my desktop, I can usually manually reconnect, or it just reconnects on its own later. Not this morning! After fighting with it for a while, I even dug out the WiFi booster I had to use before the move. Still nothing. I finally went to my husband (love having a techy in the house!) and he tried to see what was wrong.

Turns out, it wasn’t my desktop.

As I write this, he’s just finished having to reset the modem to factory default. I’ve got internet again, so it must have worked!

Fun times! :-/

The Re-Farmer

Update: so it looks like our router is hooped. We can get internet, but the speed has dropped dramatically. As near as we can figure, it’s just too old and finally giving out. *sigh*