I checked the weather before heading outside this morning.

We are well sheltered from the wind, for the most part, but it doesn’t take much for that “RealFeel” to drop.

We gave up on keeping a thermometer in the cat house, as they kept knocking it down, but I’ve left it outside, in the top of the shelf shelter, so it’s completely sheltered from wind and sun. I remembered to check it this morning.

-21C vs -24C isn’t much difference on a thermometer, but there’s a difference when you’re in it!

The sunroom thermometer was just below zero, still. I noticed there was no food at all left in the sun room, and the heated water bowl was low, even though it was refilled last night, but there was still plenty of food outside. The big heated water bowl was quite full, too. I could see cats in the window of the cat house. Clearly, they are staying indoors as much as possible! I do still see cats coming out from under the storage house. The remains of the basement under there would provide decent shelter, too.

It could be a lot worse, though. We are expecting a high of -17C today. The roads have been plowed, and I hope to get to my mother’s to do some grocery shopping for her. The city we used to live in, however, is expected to hit temperatures of -41C! That’s before windchill, too! That’s just deadly cold.

I tried to go to bed early last night, but of course, things messed that up.

One of those things was the phone.

With the line repaired, I returned the phone base to my bedroom/office. I set it up in a different spot on my craft table, where it would be more visible while I was in bed.

Which is why I saw the blinking red light.

Yup. The “hold” light was blinking again.

I picked up to check the line, and got just a crackling noise.

The bottom of the handset was also wet.

I grabbed some paper towel and found that where the handset rests in the base and charges had a puddle.

There was even a small puddle under the phone, which I could not see until I moved the base.

Now, my first thought is, a cat peed on it. But I’m not sure how. For starters, there was no visible sign of it. How can a cat pee into the phone base, without peeing on the handset? There was also no smell, and the puddle underneath looked like water. Plus, there was no space for a cat to position themselves in such a way as to pee on the phone without knocking things all over.

The alternative is that somehow, my bedside water bottles spilled, but those were still closed and upright.

So it had to be a cat, yet couldn’t have been a cat. !!

I took the whole thing out, cleaned it up as best I could, then set it aside to dry. Then I used a corded phone to test the line using the jack in the living room.

Still crackling.

So a job for today would be to call the phone company again. Before starting this post, I was going to try doing that from my cell phone. My husband went through it, trying to figure out why the wifi calling wasn’t working on my phone. He ended up doing a reset somewhere, and that seems to have done the trick.

Before calling, though, I checked the phone.

We have a dial tone again.

I want to test the other phone and see if it’s still working, but my guess is, it will need replacing.

We need to have a working phone, though. My husband has a phone appointment with his doctor today. He primary pain meds are getting hard to get, so his doctor wants to try him on something else.

Something that actually works better would be nice. Still, even that could be worse. At least it takes the edge off his pain enough to function, somewhat.

We shall see how things go.

The Re-Farmer