Still cold.  And what’s worse is it was very warm the last two days and now it’s very cold which means that everything – everything – is ice.  It’s treacherous walking from the house to the garage or from the garage to the chicken coop.  I don’t think it got above 0 today.  When I went out to feed the chickens, I checked on the propane tank.  I was glad I did as we’re down to about 8%.  We haven’t been running the wood boiler so we went through our last delivery of propane really quickly.  We should be able to get another delivery before we run out, but I decided to cut some wood for the boiler anyway.  It was about -6 and very windy while I was doing it.  I would guess the wind-chill was in the ballpark of -35.  My eyebrows and eyelashes were covered with ice after a few minutes of working.  I don’t mean they were cold, or even frosty.  I mean big chunks of ice.  What’s left of our wood pile was covered in snow and frozen together, but I managed to get enough wood for a couple of days cut, and even more important, I managed to get the fire started.  Unfortunately, so far, this is all worthless because, despite the anti-freeze in the system and assurances from the previous owner that the system wouldn’t freeze, it’s frozen.  The pump isn’t pumping anything and no warm hot water is coming to the house.  We’re supposed to be getting propane Thursday, so we’ve lowered the thermostats and have a fire going and now we’re just hoping we make it.

I went for a snowmobile ride to Hoyt Lakes yesterday (it was 40 yesterday, 0 today).  I stopped in a nice little restaurant called Vaughs Family Restaurant and had some really good tater skins, a pepper burger, and onion rings.  The remarkable thing about this ride is that I took off from and ended at our house!  I was spoiled in Ely because the Taconite and Tomahawk trails, plus Shagawa Lake, were all right there.  I had several options right from my door.  This year I’ve been trailering to the trail because there’s no real easy way to ride there.  Well, I finally attempted it, and while it wasn’t easy, I did it.  First I rode next to the highway to Kaunonen Lake Rd and then down to the Embarrass River.  I rode that toward Babbitt, seeing LOTS of animal tracks, and when it got to the point where I couldn’t ride on the river, I cut across to Salo Rd and back up to the highway.  I rode in the ditch past Benville and then found a little trail that took me to the main trail, which I took to Babbitt.  It took me probably a half hour to make it to the gas station from our house.  After filling up (5.3 gallons used for a 120 mile ride – I love my 4 stroke!) I took off toward Embarrass and then to Hoyt Lakes.  On the way back I decided to try to get from Embarrass back to the house.  There’s really only one way to do that – the ditch along the highway.  It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought, and again it took me about a half hour.  It’s still easier to trailer, but now at least I can still ride if Emily needs the car.

Blackie the barn cat is missing.  We haven’t seen her in 10 days or so.  The second to last time I saw her, her face was all swollen and she had a raw spot on her chin.  The next day I saw her again and she looked better, but she hasn’t been seen since.  On the first really cold day I went out to put them in the garage and could only find Snowy, so that’s where she’s been hiding from the weather.  Either the cold got Blackie (unlikely since she has ample shelter in the barn), something else got her, or she ran away.  Snowy has been living in the garage during the really cold days, and while she was in there I didn’t see any cat footprints and the food in the barn hadn’t been touched, so Blackie really isn’t around.  I hope she’s okay, but such is the life of a barn cat I guess.

It’s very very cold.  We are going outside very little, if at all.  I am thinking about knitting lots of stuff – all of a sudden I’ve decided I’m going to MAKE time to knit and am very excited at all the things I will knit.  I started a mermaid tail for Delia, but made the mistake of leaving it on the couch and kittens and kids had their way with it, and now it’s a pile of yarn.

Because it’s so cold, I’ve been leaving the bedroom door open at night.  If I don’t, it gets extra extra cold in the bedroom and I don’t like it that cold.  This means animals can come in.  This is fine, unless the ones that come in are the kittens.  Last night in my attempt to throw lift Chubby out of bed because he was about to wake Henry, he clung to one of my fingers with his claws, necessitating a band-aid and everything.  At this moment, he’s walking all over the bed around both the kids (Delia ended up in here with me somehow) and I’m just waiting him out but have removed him from Henry’s vicinity a few times.  Lucy growls at him when he tries to snuggle up next to her, maybe I should try that instead of risking any more of my skin.  It appears Chubby and Tot have both settled in by Delia’s feet.  Oh, I shouldn’t've reached down to see if the dark blob was Tot – now Chubby’s on my back.  OK, I’ll stop with the kitten play-by-play now, my apologies.

We haven’t sent out our holiday cards yet.  We still plan to.  I found the second box of them today, so now the two other boxes I bought when I could only find one box before will probably be too much, but Delia’s already signed the new ones and we’ll want to use the ones she’s signed this year since her signature won’t be the same next year…

The plumbing is still not entirely working.  Last Wednesday, Abigail discovered water in the utility room.  Ryan was out snowmobiling with Bryan, so I called him and he said to vacuum it up. The wet-dry vac was conveniently already there, plugged in, and still partially filled with water from last time this happened…  I vacuumed it up, discovered it was most likely the laundry sink overflowing but somehow related (possibly) to the water softener.   I didn’t know what else to do with it, so I poured it into the laundry sink, and as stupid as that sounds I think it was an OK thing to do.  The plumbing doesn’t seem to follow the rules of logic, so we can do things like that.  It happened again Saturday morning, but not as badly.  This prompted Ryan to clean the bathtub drain, which now drains flawlessly AND keeps water IN the tub pretty darn well too (much better than it did before anyway).  Somewhat unrelated to the backing-up thing in the basement, but plumbing all the same and it sure feels nice to take a shower and not be standing in two inches of water at the end.

We watched both football games today and were disappointed in both outcomes.  We were looking forward to a Packers Superbowl.  Oh well.  Maybe next year, eh Brett?

Henry’s waking.  Better publish this.