Images of animals in torment.

Apparently this sort of thing is "seasonal". I expect the animals are glad of that.

A Christmas Dinner.

Served on Christmas Eve but definitely a special occasion meal. This dinner started with bran mash and included rutabaga and apple chunks, molasses, a bottle of beer, and of course, the magic ingredient, Marmite.



It needed delivering. Note the surface of the driveway, a thaw and then a freeze makes for a tricky surface.



Yesterday this was a cleared path 5' wide with some water on it.



Delivering dinner may have been a struggle but the diners seemed to like it





One thing about deep snow is that it wears dogs out in no time, lacking snow shoes they sink up to their necks at every step, or more accurately bound or lunge rather than step, progress is made in a series of leaps and flops.





When you go home you have a dog that just wants to lay on the floor. A wet dog. A wet dog with lots of fur and chunks of ice throughout that fur.

Cats in the condo.

They like it!



They choose to sleep in it!



Fuzzily.

Not Christmas yet

but we have a tree



we have a kitten in a box



and since you can't easily hide it, the kittens have their gift from Anna's parents

A Storm

A mighty storm was forecast for the weekend. Red sky on Saturday morning certainly supported the idea.



though that day it was too cold for the forecast blizzard



these are the parts of the province for which there were weather warnings



yes, all of it.

We prepared by bringing in extra logs and setting them to thaw



and by curing some salmon, good food in a power cut



It did snow on Sunday and, unusually, it drifted against the back door. This is adventure kitty's first contact with it.





As the snow fell we had a bigger problem to deal with, the water supply in the barn had frozen. Aiming a heater at it eventually defrosted it (though right now it's frozen again) but in the short term the horses needed water. Nothing to do but carry buckets from the house. It's a long way especially when trudging through deep snow and frequent stops were required.



at least they cut the trip a bit by coming to the buckets



and the uphill trip is with empty buckets



We broke for an excellent lunch



excellent for cats too even if they only get the skin





Very nice, now back to work, this lot to clear. Note the drift behind Charlie, the exit to the road is between those two trees. This morning the snow had drifted in like that again, it was powder so I blasted through it, chuckling madly.



It wasn't the storm of the decade for us, not even the storm of the week, but cumulatively we have a lot of snow





At one point it looked as if we might run out of diesel so I took the Beetle and fetched a can. The roads were closed and so hadn't been ploughed. They seemed to me to be in a terrible state but it may be that I commonly drive on such roads, I just can't see how bad they are because it's usually dark and/or foggy.

Supply, Demand, Supply, Demand

I have been amazed by the demand for our farm-fresh semi-organic, totally free range eggs. At the museum alone, I cannot keep up with the customer's requests. It doesn't help that we're going into the darkest time of the year and the chickens naturally lay less when the days are shorter. We had one peak production day of eight eggs, when our magical chicken charmer, aka, Jim's daughter was here, but production has since dropped to two or three eggs a day. I guess we just have to wait until spring for things to pick up again. It does make you think, though. There is A LOT of profit in eggs. Chicken farmers must be doing very well. We charge far less than what the grocery store charges for eggs, and ours are truly free range (unlike most Canadian "free range" chickens, which, according to government regulations, are only allowed an hour or two on a cement pad per day) and we more than make up for the cost of feeding the chickens. And our eggs actually taste like eggs. And have bright yellow yolks, which stand up in the middle of the white when you crack it into the pan. I never knew that eggs had a taste before I started eating our own. Now, we can't say that they're truly organic, because free-range and organic are simply incompatible. There is now way to gaurantee that the crickets that our chickens eat have never touched a GM crop or tasted a pesticide. It is safe to say, in fact, given our neighbours' agricultural practices, that they have ingested all sorts of strange chemicals and messed up potato genes. But damnit, people want to eat their eggs anyway. I know some of you thought we were crazy when we started with 25 chickens. Frankly, I agreed with you (I've never been one to listen though, have I?) But now, we wish that we had started with 50. With all of the customer's demands, we don't get to eat any ourselves.

We need more chickens.

Working on a Curtain

So long as we keep stepping in and out of the front door carefully we should eventually be trapped:






Pretty, innit?

Anna driving the toys.

It's snowy in the fields:



Snowy enough to make driving entertaining:










I'd have a go meself if I could get near the wheel.

It's cold though, this bucket was in the barn and froze solid. We brought it up to thaw:

Do snow tyres help with this?

I came home and turned the Beetle into the driveway. I came to an abrupt halt when I hit the three foot drift.




this was one of those moments when 4WD, AWD, FWD, RWD are all equal, only really big wheels would go through that. We pushed the car back into the street and fetched the tractor.

It's scenic living here in the tree tops, if there's ever a moment when snow doesn't need maintaining:





If only you could have all that precipitation controllably on the occasional weekend.