winter wonderland

(Our little snow angel, making his own.)

Fourteen inches of snow later, and our idyllic winter evening by the fireplace turned into one of those nights that it really just sucks to live on a farm. The snow ended around the kids' bedtime, so after they were tucked in, The Map Man headed out to rev up the snowblower, and I bundled up to attack the gates with a shovel. Only the snowblower didn't start. Didn't even come close. Which seems to happen more often than not. In the past 6 or so years since we've owned the accursed thing, we've only been able to use it about half a dozen times. Starts up just fine mid-summer, prefers to hibernate during the winter. To put it mildly, that launched me into a foul, foul mood, where at one point I threatened bodily harm to The Man with a broom. He wisely left me to my own demons and set forth to seek help across the street. Our neighbor (conveniently a mechanic of sorts) decided he can probably fix the blower, just not at 11pm on a Thursday evening. So it's in his shop til the weekend. He did let us borrow his snowblower after he was done with it, so we finished up digging out the gates by hand, and The Map Man cleared the driveway around midnight. Around 1 am I was seriously contemplating our lack of sanity for choosing to live is such a place. Oh yeah, almost forgot, Annie's shelter collapsed at the height of the storm. The Map Man was able to make a repair (thanks to our foresight in having spare parts available). As for Annie, she was completely unfazed and more than happy to get back into that shelter again once the roof was tall enough for her to get under. I, on the other hand, was rapidly calculating how quickly we could ditch all of the animals, sell the property, and move to a nice condo in Florida.

But the sun arose this morning, and so did I, in much better spirits. This truly IS a gorgeous place to be, in all it's deep white winter splendor. I mean, once I'm sure emergency vehicles can reach us if need be, I'm pretty happy to be calling this place home. I took the dogs for an early morning romp out front. (Everyone except ol' Tristan, who chose to putter about the driveway instead of fend off them crazy young'uns.)

We dig out our gates by hand, but we leave the path-clearing up to animal power. Here's our champion Sheep Snow Compression Team, hard at work. With the help of judicious hay-strewing, our field went from 2 foot deep virgin drifts of snow...

...to nice wide compressed paths in just a few hours. I then spread hay around the working pens and locked them in there (if you look at the way back of this photo, you can see our Team hard at work tromping down a nice solid working surface) so that I can teach my lessons tomorrow morning as scheduled. Meanwhile, the horses were hard at work making trails between hay piles in the pasture so that my students have a good path to get to the pens.

The kids couldn't wait to get out and play in the white stuff. It's all I heard about last night and this morning, so when I finally had everything under control, I set them loose on our back hill, warmly dressed and sleds-in-hand. We have an unfortunate slant to our hill that lands the kids squarely into our pasture fencing a the bottom of their sled run, but I taught them how to hit it firmly boot-first, and we had no injuries during the course of the afternoon. I'm thinking a few well-placed straw bales may be in order down there.

Next storm due in tomorrow night, supposed to be a real potent Nor'easter, although it's questionable as to whether it'll be snow or ice. This IS New England, but even for here, this much snow before Christmas is a bit unusual. This sort of smacks of January, which is making me wonder what THAT month is going to be like this year....