Greenstorm's Journal

Avallu turns 7 soon. For a large breed he's starting to not be young anymore.

As I sit here with all the cats and dogs around me, with maybe needing to take Hazard in to get his teeth looked at and Avallu's birthday looming, I'm thinking.

One of the gifts we give our pets, so rare outside our walls, is the ability to get old.

Equinox has passed. Fittingly, this is the week where snow is warming into liquid water. Geese group up and each group guards its puddle, splashing and spraying water and posturing and calling to each other. Everything is dripping. The driveway ice has dropped two inches, leaving a tarp and my truck and any other obstructions to the sun sitting on pillars while streamlets run down and back to disappear under the snow. The fences have grown a foot as the snow slowly subsides: on my one window that was covered I can see it consolidate from fluffy white into shimmering blue ice underneath. This is how glaciers are formed.

I celebrated this equinox by loving things, gently and carefully: my animals, which I've been practicing with, and people just a little around the edges. Maybe I'm waiting to love my garden because it's such a huge project, such a huge part of my heart, but it's beginning to seem possible. It feels like learning to walk: one step at a time, sometimes I try and find that I'm back on the ground, and sometimes I cross a distance without noticing until afterwards.

I went out and shoveled the sundeck without any clothes on at solar noon and my skin couldn't remember what to do: do we sunburn with the sun still so low in the sky? How do we deal with this kind of radiant heat? It was lovely. It's reached 8 or 10 degrees out even.

I'm getting a little less sleepy. I'm not functional, but I do have moments when I'm beginning to feel close to fully awake. I still can't think well. I've never had good working memory, but for a long time I've been able to repurpose the part of my mind that forms words right before I speak them for that use. Now that is gone too. I can't perform data manipulations in my head at all: I can't do 10 + 12 unless I write down the 10 and the 12, for example, because I can't remember the original numbers plus do the operation in my head at the same time, but if I'm looking at them I can easily perform the operation.

Doctor's appointments continue, slowly.

Hazard has been roaming outside again, and his coat is soft instead of heavy. I watched him jump atop a pallet the other day, and when it fell over he shook himself off and complained to me. It's good to see. I was worried about him and now I'm not, though I suspect I'll need to prepare for next winter to keep him sufficiently entertained.

Whiskey continues to snuggle me relentlessly and Demon bestows the favour of his lounging, purring attention twice a day or so. Whiskey has definitely won in the last several years: he gets to sit on me more or less when he wants now, laptop or not, though he respects mealtimes.

Avallu comes in for snuggling most evenings, waiting outside the dog door and distressing the cats by blocking it with his back, and Thea comes in many mornings. This weather makes Thea ecstatic: she runs in joyous circles around the house and poor Avallu has more invitations to play than he can handle. He'll come put his side against my leg and lean, looking at me for help as she rockets around. She's dug a bed beside a large square haybale, the 3' x 8' ones, and has set up most of her housekeeping there. As livestock guardian dogs they have such a stable temperament and they are usually very low-energy unless there's a threat. I rarely get to see them act like playful puppydogs, and it's fun. As the season heats up they'll seek shade and slow down again.

I sit on the couch with the cats and watch "vocal coach reacts to--" videos and sing along. Last night I made a chocolate cake to go with the can of pork stew I pulled out of the pantry. I've permanently opened the curtains to the patio door and I've even cleaned the porcelain parts of the bathroom. Each day is incrementally healing. It's been so painful; it's just good to not be in pain, and so good to be actively loved by living creatures who accept me absolutely.

The days are getting better maybe but I'm not keeping track. We're all tilting towards the sun together but I'm not thinking about it right now. It's just a day that's actually ok, and then another.

Two nights ago: poor sleep and a cat in pain. Yesterday: predawn emergency vet run to the city two (and a half) hours away, waiting for answers at a friend's place until late afternoon. Today: medicating cat and trying to nap my nervous system back into alignment.

When he was in pain he came to me for help. I'm glad I could help.

I'm glad I could bring him home.

I was rushing around to get to the airport and my ring flew off outside. It bounced off the icy, frozen-goose-poop-studded driveway with a surprisingly loud clang. The truck was running, had been warming up. I'd just fed the baby pigs and was going to grab stuff and go, to be on time.

Now I was looking for a gold ring in a varying field of sparkly cratered tan-through-brown in varying textures.

The last several days had been a lot.

It's been so cold, and cold with no snow insulation. We have maybe 8" on the ground, if that, which means that the cold drives right in. I've been working hard and more or less constantly to make sure everyone is ok, which means running a lot of water and food and straw; with no snow to insulate the outside of animal houses, straw inside is the best bet. But the straw clogs up with poop and needs to be refreshed every day or two, the pile of straw in the animal houses climbs higher (great for the garden, all layered with manure, but too much and I run out of headroom) and then every piece of clothing I own has prickly stabby awns and slivers of straw in it but I need to wear clothing all the time because it's cold. Water goes out a couple times a day from inside, which is fine, but then it freezes in the containers and needs to be removed either with a lot of brute force stomping if I'm extra strong or by being carried into the house and set by the stove until the ice plug loosens enough to slide out.

My insulated gloves are MIA, or at least, I seem to have the right hand from several pairs. I sewed myself fingerless polar fleece gloves which lets me carry the coldest things in my palms and leaves my fingers free to open feed bags, but the first couple days especially it takes my hands a long time to rebuild the circulation they need to function in weather like this. My fingers go numb, I finish what I'm doing and go in, I warm up, I go back out, rinse, repeat. Several days into it my hands maintain warmth much better. The skin on my face goes numb too, but I've figured out some sort of system with two tubes of polar fleece that keeps my breath from freezing on cloth but covers my cheeks.

Nothing behaves. Water acts like wax poured from a lit candle: it forms that film first, then solidifies. A good bucket of water can stay mostly thawed for an hour or two, but a little spill instantly makes a spot that will be slick all winter, and a spill in the wrong place can weld a door closed or wedge it open. I spend a surprising amount of time walking around with a hammer knocking ice out of inconvenient spaces. Plastic snaps. Thank goodness my staple gun is a plain mechanical object; once I warm it up inside so it doesn't burn my hands with cold, I can take it out and staple old feedbags to the inside of the bird houses to block draughts and provide insulation. Starting the truck, even with a battery blanket and block heater, sounded like the end of the world for awhile.

The cats, trapped inside, are bored. They form new relationship with each other, trying to entice each other into playing but too irritable to respond reasonably so they squabble and zip through the house at full speed with tufts of each other's fur in their mouths.

The plastic of the special, insulated, triple-layer dog door has gone hard which means that when Thea comes in and out every three minutes to check in here, the door doesn't shut properly and the temperature in here drops, sometimes as much as 5 degrees in 3 minutes. It takes the stove awhile to recover that.

The stove, meanwhile, has a stupendous chimney and so its heat output fluctuates with the outside temperature and the wind and goodness knows what else. I carefully swing the cycle around so I can go into the airport for six hours without the house getting too cold, but the flight is cancelled and I have to set an alarm for 1 and then nope, 2am to refresh the wood so we stay warm enough in here since I'm not up already driving home at that time.

The floor is covered in fragments of bark, and straw. I can sweep it three times a day or not, it makes o difference. The patio doors in my cathedral-ceilinged livingroom leak air like a sieve and I haven't had the wherewithal to move furniture to put window wrap on them. I close the curtains but the draught still comes through and the floor in there feels like ice.

So when the ring that symbolizes my commitment to whatever part of this is meaningful slips off my finger and I can't see it in the field of goose poop in first glance, and I have an appointment that symbolizes the outside world that wants me to give up on this, I wonder if it's a sign. Do I leave the ring wherever it is (still can't see it) and come home and write a post offering all the outdoor animals to someone and just-- go? Create a life where the weather doesn't dictate my actions, even if it continues to inform my choices?

I decided to leave the ring there but I kept standing there, looking, anyhow. This is a symbol that this is enough, I thought, I'm leaving. But. I kept looking for the ring. Eventually I spotted it: gold, the colour of shiny goose poop, in piles of frozen shiny goose poop.

It turns out that was the morning after the coldest night. It was supposed to get colder the next night and it never did. At 9pm I took water out in buckets, watching the animals drink by headlamp, and fluffed up straw. My hands were acclimatizing and I didn't need to come in and warm up, they felt fine. At bedtime none of the animals was shivering, always a good sign. The forecast wind never appeared and in the dead calm it felt almost warm.

They say tonight is the last of the hard nights for awhile, or at least, the last of the deathly cold ones. The next forecast is for snow and, somehow, freezing rain which is of course any ran that lands on a ground that has been seared by -35C for days. Several daily runs with water will be replaced by trying to start the snowblower and trying not to knock the blades loose on towers of frozen goose poop. Carrying so much straw will be replaced by several days of butchering and then carrying much less straw.

I took water and straw out tonight again. No one was shivering. We got through last night, which wasn't as bad as expected. We got through the night before that, which was way worse. We got through several nights previous to that where the cold built and settled like a malevolent beast. Somehow the pigs were trotting around and even the tiny, densely-furred little ones were roughousing as I fluffed the straw for them, and the adults got down to business grabbing mouthfulls of it and pawing it to fluff it up by my side. They drank two buckets of water and grunted interestedly and went to bed. The chickens fluffed up perfectly round on their perches (2x4s turned on their wide sides, so they can perch without frostbiting their toes) with little frost spots where heat could make it through those feathers. The ducks tried to climb into their bowl of water. The muscovies were alert under their lamp and not shivering and were walking fine-- if somonee is going to get frostbite it will be them and I've lost some over the years to frozen feet. Their cushion of straw seemed to be working though.

Now the dogs are both burrowed into straw in their chosen locations. The cats are strewn across the woodstove room as the embers burn down and down until there's enough room for me to load up a night's worth of wood. Everyone is nestled in their beds. A thousand scratchy shards of straw poke through my pants, needling at my legs; upstairs I have piles of fabric that, maybe, won't hold straw if it's sewn into new pants. My ring gleams once more on my finger. In eight or nine hours the worst of this one bit will be over, and the next bit will begin.

Well, I may not be doing well generally, but I do feel more like myself whenever I spend some time outside.

The difficulty being, today was between -24 and -20, plus wind chill in the afternoon which takes it to "frostbite in minutes" according to the weather report. So I kept hopping out for anywhere between fifteen minutes and an hour, hopping back in, warming up, and hopping back out. Everyone got water twice, food twice or three times, and fresh straw.

I also hammered and sledged ice away from the tap so I could fit the buckets under it again. Each time a drop splashes outside the bucket it builds up another layer of ice, like a candle, until the ice on the side of the house is so thick the bucket doesn't fit anymore. It's a problem.

The muscovies got a heat lamp, which because the cord that runs out there got its plug frozen into the ice, meant running a chain of three extension cords out there. Then when I was fiddling with the heat lamp I had out there, the cold caused the casing on the heat lamp cord to snap in two places, so I needed to get a new heat lamp too.

I'm concerned about the pigs. They seem to be ok-- they aren't shivering in the mornings, and there are so many of them in those pig houses it stays pretty warm in there. But every time I give them straw they just pack it down under them instead of burrowing under it and using it as insulation. I guess they don't need the insulation yet. I keep giving them straw and they keep packing it down, though, it feels like a waste? Maybe after the butcher there'll be fewer and they'll go under. I don't seal up all the holes in the houses because the moisture needs to vent, to avoid frostbite -- but normally there's a lot more snow up against the sides of the A-frame as external insulation at this point, and then I go around with a shovel and heap some up against the walls of the square ones. I'll inspect in the morning and see, as usual. This really would be a whole different experience if I could just rest and be sure that everyone out there was doing well, but each winter there's a different set of situations during the cold spike.

This cold means super dry, which means my fingers don't freeze to things. That's good. It also means I touch metal things, which is bad: metal really does feel like it's burning at these temperatures.

It would be nice to have someone around who is familiar with these experiences. It really is very different from anywhere else. Yet another set of experiences that, when I describe them to people, they just look at me funny. I guess that's kind of my whole life.

So far this winter is about sitting on my new-to-me downstairs sofa more often than not, surrounded by a changing kaleidoscope of sleeping animals. Right now it's Hazard, curled up on his side with his teeth in the air, and Demon, sleeping up on the woodpile behind me with one paw draped over the edge. Half an hour ago it was Avallu on his blanket which serves the function of a carpet in front of the fire and Whiskey on his side with his head resting on my foot.

We've had really variable temperatures. It's swooped from a couple degrees above freezing to -20ishC once already, warmed up, and it's about to do it again. We had some snow, then some fluffy snow, then some wet snow, then some rain, then it froze, then it melted, and froze a couple times, then it frozen-rained. My driveway has about as much friction as wet glass: I should have snowblown it when it snowed, even though it was so few inches of snow each time it didn't seem worth it. Now I have something that would probably be nice to ice skate on.

Hazard has flopped most of the way onto his back and is clearly twitching and dreaming, and he just yowled in his sleep. It was a weird yowl but he's a weird cat.

Speaking of weird cats, last night Someone knocked a squash off the 4" high shelf and rolled/carried it about 8" into the alcove beside the woodstove. The dogs wouldn't go in there, which leaves... the cat Demon? He does tend to knock things off shelves, but I haven't seen him carry a couple-pound squash before.

Both Tucker and Josh are

(he just looooooong mrowled in his sleep again)

coming up around Christmas at different times. I will try to enjoy taking full advantage of the intervening time to sew. I was going to cut out fabric for mock-ups tonight but I put on a pair of half-sewn pants from the last time I did a round of sewing, to see what was up with them. It looks like I hadn't put cuffs or waistband on them, probably because I hadn't finished sewing up one leg, probably because the bobbin ran out of thread mid-seam and I was on a timeline to make stuff for the Cape Scott Christmas backpacking. I pulled the pants on to see what was up and they were so, so, so comfortable that I just sat around spreadsheeting and didn't want to get out of them.

Feb: pigs usually farrow
Feb 1: goose eggs begin. Geese into breeding pens.
Feb 15: duck eggs increase
March 1: chicken eggs increase, goose egg max production. Ducks into breeding pens.
April 1: geese out for spring maybe
April 6: bring out hoses, will need to disconnect and drain at night for awhile
April 10: let geese sit for max grass for gosling
April 15-30: move pigs to rear pasture
April 20-30: let ducks sit
May 1: last chance for cool butchering weather for pigs
June 1: goose eggs mostly done
June 15: geese start into back pasture as babies get big enough
Sept 15-Oct 15: butcher ducks and geese, good pig butchering weather
Sept 20: pigs into cornfields
Oct 1: hoses in, birds in from summer pasture
Oct 10: pigs into brassica fields
Nov 15: ducks and geese indoors for winter
Nov 15: pigs into winter pen when ground freezes

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.


Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

The real cold is coming. -30C was forecast this week, and -20ish for the last couple nights, but two nights ago I woke up to -26 and now boxing day night is supposed to be -40. There's a significant difference between -20 and -40 from my perspective, though I think for most people inside it's mostly just all cold.

I'm thinking of rigging some heat lamps for the other chickens and the geese. It's challenging with waterfowl (the other chickens also have the breeding anconas in with them) because chickens are reasonably polite with indoor water but waterfowl are not: they will stand in it and splash it all out, or they will get in, get out, and promptly freeze their feet to the ice that was water they splashed out a second ago. If the water is above freezing it's much, much warmer than the outside air so it's a good place to stand and warm toes from their POV. It just isn't sustainable. So I need to make the heat lamps high enough they won't get splashed or hit by wings, low enough they actually heat something up, and the water needs to be covered enough that no one can get into it. If I have heat lamps over the water, it needs to be covered with something non-flammable and that the birds won't freeze to when it's covered in ice and they try to stand on it. I rig something up every year; I have no idea what this year will look like.

Additionally, moisture from the warm water & the animals' breaths is very dangerous. Because the ambient air is so cold, the moisture condenses on skin and can cause frostbite in temperatures that would otherwise be fine. Chicken combs tend to get this kind of frostbite which is why I keep chanteclers and americaunas: chickens with combs flat to their heads that aren't as vulnerable.

Everyone will get more deep straw as insulation - I am so glad I managed to get two large bales of straw last week, and Josh and I rigged up a rope to a tree so I could drive them off. I'm not worried about running out of straw at all so I can bring everyone fresh everyday if they need.

I'm hoping with all the geese pooping all the time I can get some heating from deep bedding going in the woodshed: it's got a deep mixed layer of straw and manure right now, but not enough manure to really heat it up. It's harder to get good bacterial action going in winter when it's already cold, but their bodies on top of it warm it up some. We'll see: it worked the first year I got muscovies.

This is really hard on equipment too: when water freezes in a bucket it freezes fast and often expands enough to pop the bucket. I've lost several of what I thought were indestructible rubber buckets to these temperatures because the bottom blew out. Plastic gets very brittle and tends to snap. Machines aren't thrilled, though I just got some of the recommended 0W-30 oil for the snowblower when it's below -20C, it came with I think 10W and that's what I've been using. It should help. I think the truck might have the wrong oil on it too, it's showing noticeably higher oil pressure when it's cold, but if I use the plug-in heater it seems ok. Plus, equipment-wise, my tap has been hard-frozen since Josh was here despite the temp warming to where it shouldn't have frozen. I'll try a hairdryer on it but I'm worried I may need to open up that wall. Ugh. I'm not sure how much it would cost to run a frost-free standpipe to the pigpen but that couple thousand dollars might be worth it, or at least it feels like it on days like this.

I met a person at a salve-making workshop the other day who remembers this house when her friend lived here long ago. Apparently, in addition to the wire and water to the back barn, there were also garden standpipes for water. Barn, wire, water everywhere: that infrastructure would have been so precious to me. I wish it hadn't been taken out, and I kind of wonder why it was.

Anyhow, I have some chicken stock to can, and some bones on the deck to turn into pork stock to can, and I'll run that through on the coldest day to boost the house a little.

I'm also giving thought to an air purifier/heater item for the bedroom since I know wood heat tends to be hard on the lungs, cats aren't great for me (though they aren't supposed to be in the bedroom; Whiskey lies there with his paws both just outside the threshold) and my lungs are already pretty trashed from years of housecleaning work and forest fires. Any room without the woodstove in it needs a bit of a boost at -40. Anyhow, it's a thought. I did a sweep of the rooms with baseboard heaters (one kleenex on one in the guest room, one bottlecap on one in the pantry) and I think we're as good as it gets.

Below -25 or so I get pretty tired when I spend a bunch of time outside so I'm revising my accomplishments down a little for this next week. If we're all fed and watered and no one gets frostbite I'll consider it a win.

Loaded geese and ducks and spare roosters. It's always hard, especially the geese. I love them.