Oh, I am extra glad we don’t need to go anywhere, tomorrow!
The -21C is not too big of a deal.
The wind chill at -35C is a whole different story!!
That’s -6F with a wind chill of -31F, for those of you in the US.
On the plus side, tomorrow’s predicted high is now -17C/1F tomorrow, which is a few degrees warmer than previously forecast. Looks like the cold swept in faster than expected.
By Thursday, we are supposed to warm up to -1C/30F.
It’s like temperature whiplash!
The Re-Farmer
I’m really glad we were able to plug power back into the cat’s house, when we couldn’t do it through the sun room any more. Temperatures have dropped, and while we are reaching above freezing during the day, it’s getting quite a bit colder overnight.
Since it’s too cold to continue with the clean up, when I was finishing my morning rounds, I decided to move the poles closer to the house and the garden area, so they will be handy when it’s time to start building the trellises and supports.
This gave me the opportunity to somewhat sort them by size. While I deliberately chose our winter squash to be smaller, shorter season, varieties, they will still need very sturdy supports, as will the gourds. While all of these will be temporary, they still need to be strong enough to hold a fair bit of way, and sturdy enough to not blow over in high winds.
We haven’t even decided on what form these supports will take, yet! But at least we’ll have ample materials, and can figure things out as we go.
The Re-Farmer
Can you believe this???
These are the temperatures, screencapped just minutes before I started this post.
That’s right. We’re at -28C/-18F with a wind chill of -32C/-26F. Actually, the wind chill was reading at -35C/-31F when I did the (short version!) morning rounds! I only saw Potato Beetle when I opened the sun room. Not a single other cat came out. He was more than content to let me put him back in the sun room and close the door!
This isn’t another Polar Vortex. This is Nature saying, “Welcome to March. Here’s a kick in the teeth for ya!”
In less than an hour from now, I’ll be leaving to bring the van in to get looked at. This isn’t an appointment. This is a drop off so he can look at it in between his appointments. Which means I have to hang out in town for who knows how many hours, until he’s had a chance to check it and gives me a call. And because of the flippin’ Schrodinger’s virus restrictions, the only place I can go to is the grocery store across the street, because there isn’t a coffee shop or restaurant or anywhere indoors where anyone can just sit anymore. Keep in mind that this municipality hasn’t had a single case. Nor has ours. Nor has the municipality my mother lives in. There was only one person who turned out to have a false positive in the entire area, back in the summer. In fact, in looking at the official government stats for all cause deaths in this province, the pandemic never hit us. 2020 is indistinguishable from any year from 2014 on.
And get this. Tomorrow?
We’re supposed to reach a high of 2C/36F
The Re-Farmer
After getting teased with spring, the temperatures lurched back downwards last night.
Also, I am SO tired of our intermittent internet. It took me forever to get any of my weather apps to load! We’ll be able to switch back to the primary account soon. Hopefully, that will be better again. :-/
As I write this, we’re still at -24C/-11F, but the wind chill has “warmed” up to -33C/-27. It was pretty steady like that, all night.
I am really looking forward to that 6C/43F two Sundays from now!!
While doing my rounds this morning, I opened up the sun room to let Potato out for a bit, if he wanted. Along with the warm water, I had a treat for the kitties. I’d kept the meat juices and dregs from a roasting pan. Usually, I’d use it as part of the liquid for a soup, or make a gravy out of it, but this was onion free, and safe for cats. The juices had gelled, so I added warm water to melt it and brought it out for the cold kitties.
They were so excited for the treat!!! Cats that would normally stay away from each other were all pushing their way into the bowl, ignoring the container of warm water they usually go for, while I knocked the ice out of the water bowls. With the temperature fluctuations, the metal bowls are in melted depressions of ice, and I had to use a chipper to get one of them out! LOL
I was happy to see that the terrarium heat bulb was enough to keep Potato Beetle’s water from freezing. There was just a bit of ice on the water surface furthest from the bulb.
Once the water was taken care of, I fought some kitties off the bowl of meat juices and split it between the various food bowls. More room for more cats to have a treat! The very last bits in the bowl, which had chunks of meat in it, went into Potato’s bowl in the sun room. He had gone outside after I’d opened the door, but it didn’t take much for him to go back in! We are a bit concerned about him being alone and lonely in there, but he seems to be content over the whole situation.
I tried to get a picture of his wound, but he wouldn’t stay still, so this was the best I could get! Now that the fur is shaved, we can see that it’s a rather large puncture wound – and there is a smaller one, next to it! It’s drying up and scabbing over nicely, though. We’ll keep Potato in the sun room for a few more days. Once it warms up again, it should be okay for him to be outside with his little nekkid patch.
I’m not sure what we’ll do if he wants to stay in the sun room, though! We’ve tried propping the doors open, but then we caught Nicky the Nose in there, asserting his dominance. :-(
I wonder if that old sling shot I found in the garage is still usable… :-/
Since Potato was content in the sun room, I closed him up again and continued my rounds.
I had lots of company.
I had five of them! Butterscotch and Nostrildamus, the spice boys and Rolando Moon, all came along.
Then I turned around and there was number six.
Creamsicle Jr. many not want us coming anywhere near him, but that doesn’t stop him from following me around!
Unfortunately, this lurch into colder temperatures has been very rough on my husband’s pain levels (the added medications are helping, but not much at this point), and this morning, his TENS machine just stopped working. It seems one of the wires has … broken? I don’t know. He’s in a lot of pain, so his tolerance to try and figure it out is out the window. It’s an older machine, so I don’t know if we can get new wires for it anymore. The plug in port is universal, so we should be able to. I’ll have to do some looking.
But it will wait until later. I just got a call from my sister in law. She’s dropped my brother off to see my mother, and is on her way to deliver the pressure cooker! Time to go open the gate. :-)
The Re-Farmer
I might wait just a bit longer. I’m sure the critters won’t mind staying sheltered a bit longer, either.
The temperatures plummeted last night! It’s now almost 10am as I write this, and it’s still -27C/-16.6F with a wind chill of -35C/-31F out there.
The app on my phone says we’ve already “warmed up” to -25C/-13F with a wind chill of -28C/-18.4F
It’s supposed to continue warming up but we won’t be getting warmer than -20C/-4F for a few more hours. So I’m going to have to get out there and get some warmer food and water for the outside cats soon. There will still be both food and water out there right now. I just want to make sure they have some that is a bit more pleasant to ingest!
The plan for today was supposed to be clearing enough snow in the yard to drive the van to the house tomorrow, so we can load it up and make a trip to the dump. We haven’t been able to make that trip in way too long, but with temperatures like this, it might have to wait again. :-( We could postpone clearing the snow in the yard until tomorrow, but the dump is open for only a few hours in the morning on Tuesdays, and it will probably be closed by the time we’re done. It’s supposed to reach an absolutely tropical -7C/19.4F tomorrow, bringing a couple of centimeters of snow along with it.
Yeah. I think we’ll do the clearing tomorrow afternoon and make the dump run when it’s open again on Thursday evening. They are open for a full 8 hours on Saturdays, but that’s New Year’s Day, so they’ll be closed this weekend.
Definitely one of the downsides of living in the boonies. Maybe this explains why we’re finding so much garbage as we clean up around the farm!
The Re-Farmer
I can tell how much milder the temperatures have gotten these past few days, but how many of the outside cats I see when I do my rounds in the morning! I saw 9 of them this morning, including Rolando Moon, who has been away for a week or two, but showed up yesterday.
I had 5 cats following me when I went to check on the gate. When I came back to the house, I had this surly face to greet me.
We had brought several pieces of the maple that I’d cut away from the roof of the old chicken coop to the house, for future wood working projects. They’re odd shapes and keep falling over.
The cats really like them, and Rolando Moon seems to really appreciate having a relatively warm perch to sit on, out of the snow!
She is such an ornery old cat. I love her! :-D
The Re-Farmer
My goodness, it’s wicked out there this morning!
That -12C (10F) isn’t too bad. It’s the -21C (-5F) wind chill!
Actually, I’m pretty sure that in our yard, the wind chill is more severe than that!
The amazing thing is that we are supposed to reach 0C (32F) by this evening.
The winds are driving into our yard from the south/southeast. One thing we have noticed since moving here is that it’s those south winds that are the worst! When it comes time to plant more shelter belt trees, that is where we will need to focus on.
With the cat house and kibble house, the winds are driving right into the active areas. There isn’t much we can do about it. Even shifting the kibble house to more of a 90 degree angle with the cat house, wouldn’t do much with these winds. The good thing is, when my brother built the shelter for his dogs, he added on that “porch”, and the entry has two layers of carpet strips. Without those strips, the wind would be blowing straight into the opening, even with the kibble house sheltering it more. Any wind that does get in is going into the “porch” area, and not affecting the main part of the shelter very much, so the kitties are still cozy inside.
The kibble house is working out very well, though. The inside is sheltered from the wind almost completely, so the cats can eat in peace. Even the gap under the kibble house is quite sheltered. The sheet of insulation I put under there (the photo is from when that was done; it was too cold to take photos this morning!) actually blocks spaces where the wind would be getting in from the south, since it fits under the support pieces.
The water bowls are not sheltered, though. The heated bowl near the entrance – which had ice forming across the top, again! – has some shelter, but the others along the side of the cat house are getting the full brunt of the wind.
I think, next year, we should build another small shelter for the non-heated water bowls. Depending on how it’s positioned, it can act as a wind break, while still allowing sunlight to reach the one window of the cat house they love to sit in so much! :-)
Amazingly, I still had cats following me around while I was switching out the memory cards on the trail cams. Poor Potato Beetle was shivering when I picked him up and carried him back to the house. The silly boy had been up on the roof, earlier. No shelter up there!
I am so glad we don’t need to go anywhere today.
Doing bread baking and laundry sounds really good right now! :-D
The Re-Farmer
It was a bit perplexing, looking at the weather forecasts over the past few days. We’d have these lovely temperatures, hovering just a bit below freezing, while the app was saying it was cold.
A few days ago, I could at least blame the wind chill…
Continue readingThe cold snap that has been working its way across the prairies has hit us.
It was -31C/-23F, with a wind chill of -39C/-38F this morning. At the time I write this, we have warmed up to -29C/-20F with a wind chill of -31C/-23F. The weather alert on my app is still saying wind chills may reach between -40C/F to -50C/-58F. !!!
Hard to believe that, tomorrow, we’re supposed to warm up to -9C/15F!
Heading out to feed the critters meant layering up. Two pairs of socks in my new, rated to -40C, winter boots. Two pairs of pants. A t-shirt under my sweatshirt. A hoodie – hood up – under my down filled park – also hood up! and double layered insulated gloves.
I was rather impressed when I saw this under the door.
Continue readingI was able to swing by the lake this morning. I’d been able to swing by yesterday, as well, and saw that the first few ice fishing sheds were being put up. Today, there were a few more.
I stayed nice and warm in the car to take this photo – I wasn’t about to walk to the beach just to get pictures in this cold! LOL
To the left of the photo is a large mound on the beach. That is sand that was dredged out of the storm drain, after the blizzard we had in early October.
The ice is now thick enough to be safe to drive on, so ice fishing season can start. The “road” to this area is cleared of snow.
I wasn’t able to get pictures, but on the other side of the ice road, I could see vehicles in the distance, and snowmobiles pulling loads across. This is the area where a track has been cleared and people could get lessons in ice driving. Police and ambulance drivers also used the track to practice on. It looks like the organizers are starting to set up with that. No track is cleared yet, but that didn’t stop one car that I saw from going on the ice and spinning around through the loose snow.
That brings back memories! As a passenger, though, not a driver. :-D
It’s interesting to think about how there are entire industries and businesses that rely on ice like this!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 