Day 21 of 365 days of live on our small family farm

Good morning, cold as heck here...9 degrees can you believe it.  I am having a bit of a time adjusting, I know I am going to hate the next electric bill as I have had to pull out extra little hot spot heaters to heat areas where the cold just pours through.  These houses were not designed for arctic weather.  So of course the hot water is frozen again, ughhh!  I was up at five and it was flowing nice and then I was going to get up in half an hour and turn it on again, but I fell asleep and that is all it took by 6 it was frozen and dripping slowly, I left it drip for a while and then gave up.  I will try to get it going again today; yesterday unknown to me a pipe came loose and filled our ditch with water.  This summer these lines we all have to replaced and buried much deeper as the winters will only get colder from here on out.  I will also be buying electric tank-less water heaters to place in the house, in place of our now 5 year old electric tank water heater which lives in the water house and is a large part of why the pipe keeps freezing.  It is a never ending quest keeping up with repairs to the house and we never seem to ever get done.  If I won the lottery I would finish it all, go off grid, buy all my family a place of their own and buy the land next to me, then I would get a hot tub, restore all my vehicles to perfect running condition and have them repainted.  I would send all the kids to college, get a maid and then maybe I could keep up with my school work and the farm work. 

I am making biscuits’ and gravy for lunch along with some bean burgers.  I am going to try and made some French bread either today or tomorrow; it goes great with the bean burgers.  We the recipe for the bean burgers from parent’s magazine, but had to remake it as we have to with most recipes as we are not rich and do not have endless wild spices to play with.  Sometimes we have to change them because most people have cans of beans in our house, we have to make beans to use the recipes, so it adds time and changes amounts of everything including salt. 

Anyway today was sort of bum day for me with the babies so they are running through the house at the moment…lol 

We made pizza for dinner and I made a canola with bean burger meat…pretty cool.

So on to the hubbies post, I need to get some studying done.

News From The Doghouse and the Hoary Breath of Punxtawney Phil's Flatulence... Ugh! Yesterday started out brutal, frozen water lines, disconnected lines, water filled ditch where the lines are, and it was 20sF windy and getting colder. Got things going though, trenched the ditch a bit and had water flowing downhill on top of all the ice and snow coming down at the time... Got all the birds fed and watered, and they were happy, the air was dry so fresh water got them going to lay eggs in the freezing atmosphere, got some eggs in time before they froze, no loss on the frozen ones...they got eaten by Bears and transformed into cornbread or other meals... Had a roaring fire going all day and all night, and I do not think we got nippy or cold, kept everything fairly comfortable. I got up a lot last night, trying to keep the water lines flowing and tossing wood on the fire soon as I realized the fan had stopped blowing excess hot air. We went through a lot of wood but that was expected, our electric heat is back-up and supplementary, the gas heat does well too, but still that system is set up for supplementary as well. It does a great job if its not too cold but you got to turn it down to real low burn for the heat or you roast, so if it gets colder you have to adjust accordingly, and the excess heat flows a bit into the hallway and kitchen, if you got the oven going, baking something, the entire house is comfortably warm. Just takes a little bit of work, persistence, trial and error. We still had the hot water line freeze up sometime early in the morning @ 5 AM Today (Thursday) was a winner as well. It was 3F, could not do anything else so slept in a while, or tried to. Finally got going on things outside when it was 16F, all the big livestock was happy for the buckets of water, guess beats trying to lick snow and break ice to get at the water. The horse trough had big thick ice sheets on top and around the edge/sides, I filled it full yesterday, hope upon hope it would not entirely freeze. All the other waterers were the same or frozen entirely. The birds in the barn and the Rangers --(free range chickens and ducks and geese flocks) were happy I decided to appear, I guess. Got them their 3 gallon waterers 1st. Then started with the usual routine and order of coops and pens. Then started to stagger the waterers to get them unfrozen, could put them out in the sun and the thermal heat pretty much unthawed them, but some had to go to the basement, in front of the woodburner, because they were frozen solid. It’s strange, I guess some birds in the coops throw off more body heat, some do drink water more than others, some have more members than others as well, but there are a couple of mysteries as to why some freeze and some do not, they just ice over and thaw out easily. Expecting another cold one tonight, but it’s a piece of cake, no storm or anything. It is just clear and will make it cold because all the radiant heat escape when you have no cloud cover. It is really crisp and beautiful though, if you enjoy the fractal beauty.

Be Blessed our dear followers and friends…

Shekhinah, Michael and the kids and critters of Mahanaim Farm