Other than having a jury duty summons for this week, it didn't start out too bad. The weather was warm. Sap was running. So after work on Monday (no jury duty Monday because it was Presidents Day), I got out my maple tree tapping supplies.
Buckets: Still clean (yay to storing them stacked and upside down!)
Lids: Still clean (also stacked, but right side up)
Spiles: Yep, still clean.
Tubing: Ugh. Some very small critter (insects, I assume) had gotten into every single piece of tubing and made some sort of mud nest. Note to self: at the end of this season, put all clean dry tubing into a sealable plastic bag for storage before putting into tubing storage box.
All tubing needed to be taken to the house and washed before I could go to the woods to tap trees. Thank goodness for the extra long super skinny brush we have in our homebrew supplies; it was just the diameter to fit into the tubing, and long enough handle that I could get to the center of the tubing from each end. Not a fun job, and it took time I hadn't anticipated needing, but I got them cleaned and sanitized.
With buckets and tools (and tubing!) loaded into the tractor bucket, out to the woods I went! As you can see, there was no snow on the ground anymore, and things were actually a bit muddy.
The tapping of the trees--I decided to tap six this year--was quick and easy. I took a picture to send to DD2 and let her know my syrup season has officially begun. And then my phone died. Weird, because I was sure it had a whole lot of battery a half an hour before, when I left the house. I didn't think it was cold enough outside to drain it that quickly, but maybe it was. I'd had trouble back in the Fall if I took pictures after my phone had gotten cold while sitting in the deer stand for a few hours.
Meanwhile, DH had come back to the woods on the four-wheeler. He noticed that one of the trees I'd tapped didn't have direct access from the woods road because of a bunch of dead tree limbs he'd pushed off the road a few years before with no thought to the fact that he was pushing them against a maple tree. Since I hadn't tapped trees in that area until now, it hadn't been a big deal. Suddenly, now that I was using that part of the woods for sugaring this year, he felt the need to remove the pile.of dead branches. So he jumped on the tractor, drove it to the brush pile, put the edge of the loader bucket in position to drag those limbs away from the maple tree, and began to move them. Some of the pile went with him a few feet, then he cranked the tractor around to come at the pile again from a slightly different angle and pulled at the rest.
At which point the right front tire of the tractor fell off. Actually, the whole wheel, rim and everything.
This is a problem he's had before. Years ago it happened, and he replaced some, but not all, of the parts in the wheel assembly. Last summer it fell off once or twice. This winter, it's fallen off so many times (only while he's using it *ahem, maybe not in a way it can handle without replacing those other wheel assembly parts*) that he's gotten the process of reattaching it down to less than 10 minutes. Ironically, when I set out for the woods with the tractor that day, he'd cautioned me not to put it in 4-wheel drive because that's the mode that the wheel tends to fall off in. I had left it in two wheel, and had no issues.
Anyway, now we're back in the woods, I'm done tapping trees, and I'm ready to go back to the house to cook dinner and also call the jury hotline (because it's after 5:00 p.m.) to see if I need to report for jury duty the next morning. BUT the tire fell off the tractor, and DH has taken the 4-wheeler back to the house to get his wheel re-attaching tools and he wants me to stay in the woods to help (and also drive the tractor back once it has four wheels again). Cue the Final Jeopardy waiting music. . .
Twenty-five minutes later, I'm back in the house, the tractor (with all four wheels in place) is parked in DH's shop where it lives, dinner is started, and I called to check about jury duty and found that I didn't need to report on Tuesday. Phew.
Tuesday was a normal day. Barn work, work at home, call in after five to see about jury duty for Wednesday (a day which I happened to have a dentist appointment that, when consulted about my impending jury duty week, the dentist's office had said let's not reschedule because then I wouldn't be able to get my teeth cleaned until this Fall as they were that far out in their scheduling for cleanings; they said to hope for the best and if I had to miss my appointment to serve jury duty to just call as soon as I knew and leave them a message. No hard feelings if my cancellation was less than 24 hours notice.)
Thankfully, I didn't have jury duty on Wednesday. So I got to go to the dentist instead. Honestly, as dental visits go, it was a really good one. Maybe it was just the perspective of jury duty versus dental appointment that made it a happy event. After leaving the dentist office, I headed straight to the horse farm to work. It was sleeting, but not terribly. Our forecast for Wednesday was a winter storm moving in throughout the day, possibly freezing rain, probably sleet, maybe an inch or two of snow by Thursday morning, and definitely some ice.
What we got was more and more and more sleet. By the time I was done working (around 2:00) and ready to head home, my trusty rusty Suburban had a thin coat of ice all over. I had to bust the ice on the door handle to even open the driver's door and retrieve the ice scraper so I could set to work clearing the windshield. On the way home the roads weren't too bad, just starting to get slick in spots.
Oh boy, did it get worse after the sun went down! At 9:30, our power blinked a few times, then came on in a dim brown-out capacity. So DH went to the electric panel in the basement and shut off the main (so as to avoid damage to every appliance that was plugged in without being on a surge protector--like fridges, freezers, ovens, water softener... ) and I used my phone to get online and report the issue to our electric company. Except their website was overloaded and it took another 45 minutes before we actually were able to get through and make an official loss of power report.
Being as the ice storm was still going, and predicted to go through the night, there was no information available from the electric company as to when we might again have electricity. So DH and I just called it a night and went to bed.
We actually slept well, as it was really dark and quiet, and the house cooled off in the night making the bedroom a good temperature for deep sleep. But in the morning, when we needed to get up for work (yay, no jury duty on Thursday either!), it was chilly and not appealing to crawl out from under the covers.
DH got the generator out from where it was buried stored in a corner of the garage, hooked it up, gassed it up, and fired it up. And we had electricity to cool off the fridges and freezers, power the pump that brings the hot water from the outdoor wood boiler into the house for heat (and domestic hot water in the winter months), the well pump for cold water, and modem for the internet--so DH could work from home as he has been for most of the last three years. A quick check of the electric company website said they basically had no idea when they would get our power issue fixed because they had hundreds of thousands of customers without power due to the storm.
So we set about normal life with the generator running: using nothing that draws a lot of electricity, especially things that heat up--like the oven, microwave, etc. Which is why, when we built our house, I chose to have a gas cooktop rather than electric one. I can still cook, just not bake or roast anything. Using the generator also requires conserving water, as the well pump uses quite a bit of power and we wanted lights, heat, and water (and cold fridges and freezers) without bogging down--and stalling out--the generator.
Outside, everything had a thick coating of ice. Including the chicken door on the coop. They had to stay in until later in the day when the sun had melted things enough for the ice on the door to be thin enough DH could pull the door open.
With no jury duty, and no babysitting of Faline and Buck (as all the schools had a 'snow' day and DD1 didn't have to work) and not being scheduled at the horse farm because Thursdays this year are babysitting days, I had a day off. Of sorts. A lot of my fun options were limited due to being on generator power (no ironing of fabric for sewing, actually no sewing of anything all ready ironed, cut, and ready to sew) no unnecessary internet surfing, no baking, no recreational outdoor activities because it was SLICK. So I read some, knitted some, and then found myself working on household tasks (that didn't need electricity) that I'd been putting off.
I did take a few pictures though, until my phone turned itself off again. I'm wondering if there's some sort of glitch related to camera and the phone battery or something. . .
poor sad pine tree; thankfully it thawed and had no loss of branches
Thursday evening I called about jury duty and heaved a huge sigh of relief when told I didn't need to report on Friday morning. My week of service had gone by without actually having to appear in person. Not that I mind serving on a jury; I did in 2008, it's just that every jury summons I've gotten since then has been to the courthouse in the major city nearby (versus the small county courthouse I served at in '08) and the drive to that courthouse in that city (plus maneuvering parking ramps) stresses me out to near panic attack. The expressway I have to take is notorious for daily accidents, and currently several of it's on/off ramps are closed for construction making safe driving even more difficult. And then there's multi-lane one-way streets once I'm off that expressway and somewhat close to the courthouse. And trying to find parking in a parking ramp for my behemoth trusty rusty Suburban. . . Having the possibility of jury duty hanging over my head all week had been really stressful.
Checked the power company website; still no restoration estimate. Went to bed, same as Wednesday night (with the exception of shutting down generator and stowing in garage so it was safe from coming up missing in the night). Friday morning chilly inside the house and no update from power company, out came the generator again and DH fueled it and fired it up.
So Friday was a normal work day, like Tuesday. Except with ice. Lots of ice. The roads were all clear and dry. But the driveways and other paths that had melted to slushy on Thursday had all frozen solid over night and were skating rinks. I also was in charge of turning out all the horses at that horse farm on Friday morning because the barn owner had gone on vacation Thursday and the person she had arranged to do Friday morning feed couldn't stay until horses were done with their breakfast and ready for turnout. That person had a regular job they needed to be to by 9:00.
I managed to safely get everyone to their respective turnouts which, themselves, weren't icy. Neither was the grass of the lawn and driveway edges (which I walked horses on so none of us slipped and broke ourselves and died--sorry not sorry if the lawn got a little punched up with hooves). The normal walkways were all way too slick to traverse that morning (but much melted and usable by noon).
All the water tanks were iced over (who removed the tank heaters all ready?!?), so I grabbed a pry bar and a maul and set to work on removing the ice so the horses could drink throughout the day.
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