Today is supposed to be the last day of the extreme cold from the polar vortex. Slightly warmer than yesterday.

Eventually.

This is what it was like, earlier this morning.

View this post on Instagram

Yeah, that’s -36C/-33F, with a wind chill of -46C/-51F

And it’s still just an orange “severe weather” warning, not a red “extreme weather” warning.

If you click through the slide show, you’ll see that the heated water bowl in the sun room, next to the inside door, was almost covered in frost and ice. The last picture is of frost built up on the peak of one of the cat caves near the 250 watt heat bulb. Both cat caves had frost at their peaks, from the humidity of cats crowded inside, keeping warm. Even in the isolation shelter, the cats bundled up in the cat bed near the other 250 watt heat bulb had frost on the tips of their whiskers, and the fur of the long haired ones.

As I write this, we are now at -33C/-27F with almost no wind chill. Our high of the day is supposed to be -24C/-11F.

Tomorrow, we’re supposed to reach a very balmy (in comparison!) -15C/5F.

Hopefully, that will be enough, but it’s supposed to get a bit colder again – nothing extreme, at least – after that.

Enough for what, you ask?

For our truck.

I should be at my mother’s apartment right now.

The truck wouldn’t start.

It did try! However, with the noises it was making before stalling, I wasn’t going to keep pushing it.

I can’t even pop the hood to check the engine. It’s pulled in far enough to close the garage door, which means the nose is almost touching the counter in front. I can’t reach the middle to open the hood.

Thank God we did the extra stocking up, when we had the chance! We will be good.

I just hope the truck will be okay once things warm up again. Yes, the block heater is plugged in, and I don’t think we got cold enough to crack the engine block (yes, we’ve had that happen in the past, long ago), but there are plenty of other things this cold could destroy.

*sigh*

For now, it’s dead. Hopefully, it will resurrect.

I am so done with winter.

The Re-Farmer