Winter Wonderland

The Holiday Blizzard of 2006 is finally winding down. We have been stuck inside for 2 days and have only ventured outside to take care of the livestock. Yet again I was prepared for the worst; storing water in the bath tubs, stocking up on firewood in a dry place inside, lots of non-perishable food, etc. Yet again, we did not lose power or have anything unfortunate happen - save one incident. More on that later. I am convinced that my preparedness wards off the possibility of cut power lines and other horrible things.

We woke up yesterday to a veritable blizzard. Hubby decided to stay home, for which I was eternally grateful. During the March blizzard of 2003 he was working in Philly. Not fun. Except for brief expeditions to the barn, we remained inside glued to the newscast and shaking our heads at all the crazy people on the roads getting stuck. This morning we woke up to this:



And this:



The chicken coop is buried:



We had to dig a path for the llamas from their shelter to the water tank:



And the horses were very happy to be able to get outside and stretch their legs for a while:



Allthough they were soon covered with snow:



The dogs were ok with the snow for a little while, but thought it was too strenuous to play after a few minutes:



When the snow finally slowed down a little, we thought it time to fire up Santa's Deere (or, Kermit, the John Deere tractor), only there ws one slight problem:



That really sucks! We can't fix a flat tire here at home, and we don't have the right tool to remove the wheel. So we first need to go get the tool tomorrow and then we can bring the wheel to get fixed on Saturday. What's the big problem, you think. Well, Waste Management didn't get out here yesterday to empty our manure container. They usually come every Wednesday. With 4 horses (1 is at the trainer, thank goodness), we have somewhere in the vicinity of 320 pounds of sh*t a day that goes in this container, along with the rest of of garbage. It is filled to max capacity now. I'm suspecting they will be here tomorrow, and when they see they can't get into our driveway they'll probably just skip us for the week. Next week they won't come until Thursday due to Christmas, which leaves us with 2,240 pounds of manure and nowhere to put it. We're in deep sh*t, literally!

Oh well. I guess we'll survive. For now, I'm plodding along nicely on my Noro sweater. This is how far I'm at right now:



I'll be doing some modifications to the hoodie; I don't like how pointy it turned out. I'm also going to pick up stitches at the bottom edge of the body and make a new border to prevent the curling of the stockinette edge. Other than that, I can't wait for it to be finished. It would have been really nice to have the sweater for this storm, but this is Colorado and I'm sure there will be more storms in the near future.