dragonlady7

I knew this cold was coming, so I spent the last few days cranking out some firewood. Thursday, I split all of the log that I cut up, just dropping it onto the ground. This is split as small as I can make it to help it dry out and burn fast and hot. The basswood is very nice to split, the centers of the log, I could push it an inch into the wedge and it would pop the whole thing, so I could stick a section on and split four logs out of it in about 20 seconds. Very good. Then I went and did another dump trailer load of wood for the burner. I didn't really need it yet, but I had the time and also the storage space for it next to the burner. Plus I knew I'd go through a lot of wood with this weather and I'll be busy next week. 

Friday, I played musical equipment. The winch was on the M which is our biggest and beefiest tractor. The dump trailer was hooked up to the E. I had to take the winch off the M, unhook the trailer, put the winch on the E, put the forks on the M and also rescue the winch cable from the logs my dad skidded because the PTO pull button on the M was frozen and he couldn't pull the cable back in. I dropped the winch in place, put the forks on, lifted the logs so I could pull the cable out, then hooked the E up and got everything put away. 

Then I used the forks to get wood storage and stack the split wood. My dad built a bunch of U shaped things out of three pallets to hold wood, so I fetched those from the heifer shed which was irritating because of the things stacked in front of them. I did discover that the deer had broken into and fully emptied a bag of cover crop seed that had gotten left out there. Rude. I moved the rest of the seed back to where they shouldn't be able to get to them. Hopefully. I filled two of the holders with wood. In the picture, you can see one of the two rows of logs that fit in the holder.



Then I started cutting those logs. Only got most of one done before it got dark and the wind started picking up. 

It was 9F when I woke up this morning at 5:30am, by 8am it had dropped to 1F and it's come back up to 5F but we've had some intense wind so far. I can't run the indoor stove with these kinds of winds (the chimney isn't tall enough for our roofline, so the wind will blow down the chimney and smoke the inside of the house. we are on the hunt for the right size chimney pipe to pop on top to help with that), so I loaded the outdoor burner up but it isn't quite keeping up. It's currently 61F in the kitchen, which on the east side of the house, so I'd say the living room is probably 58F. I am wearing layers and blankets. It's not the burner's fault, there's only one loop in the whole house in the downstairs, so there's only so much it can do. I just added a couple of logs to the burner when I went out a few minutes ago. To be fair, we run around 63, 64F in the kitchen normally, so we aren't much below normal. ETA: the wind dropped off right around dark, so I've started the stove back up!

I did get dog blankets and towels and covered some of the windows and doors that are problematic. We should make it through tonight with enough ambient warmth (-4F plus wind predicted) and it will be less windy tomorrow, so I'll start the stove back up even with some wind. We never get the predicted wind speeds because of the mountains, so 30mph winds predicted tomorrow will be ~20 and that's good enough for me. We have 48mph predicted today and we've only gotten 33mph. It is extremely cold outside, I'm running between buildings when I have to go out because it's so cold. I'll need to fully bundle for the next burner load up tonight. 

One of my heated blankets has bit the dust, the one that I keep downstairs. It has made a funny smell the last few times I've used it and I found an area where the heating wire seemed twisted up, so I picked open a seam and the wire is normally white, but in that section it was red and coiled up very tightly. Seems bad. So I'm just using it as a regular blanket now and I've emailed the company I bought it from. 

I feel like maybe I should try and do some computer work but the cold is making me sleepy, so I've been spinning and working on my loom and watching olympics, mostly hockey. Some of the big air skateboarding which is just a bonkers sport. I feel like we've gone too far. It's too much. Humans shouldn't go that high or spin or land like that.