That was our temperature this morning.

I had brought the hummingbird feeders in overnight to keep them thawed.  I put them out first thing this morning.  I did notice a bird sitting on the Christmas lights string, apparently warming itself from the bulb.  It flew away.  Hopefully is OK.  Later in the morning I did see hummers feeding, so that is good anyway.

When it got light we started the chores.  The snow really is pretty.  It is too bad it is so much extra work.

Here is Tom busting the ice off one of the watering containers.

Here is one of the large branches that fell on our trailer roof.  We will have to deal with that when the freeze is over.  Hopefully there is no damage to the roof that Tom just finished putting up there.

I moved the donkeys to the now empty pig pen.  The bedding is better and it faces south so more sun exposure.  Olivia was shivering this morning.

Here is a view of our neighbor’s barn.  Just gorgeous.

Unfortunately the really bad news is that our pipes have frozen.  This is despite all of the heat tape, pipe insulation and the pumphouse heater.  We also kept the under sink cabinet doors open and the faucets dripping.  When I woke up the house faucets worked so I used the toilet and washed the dishes.  But what may have been a fatal error is I didn’t continue to let the faucet drip.  I figured with us regularly using the water that it wouldn’t freeze.  But maybe at 7 degrees that is not enough.

So Tom put a space heater near the pipes under the house.  We cranked the heat in the pump-house.  We closed off the crawlspace under the house better to hopefully hold the heat a little better.  But there is no water flow in any of our indoor nor outdoor faucets.  The pump does not appear to be frozen.  So we are not sure exactly where the freeze is.  Tom is out now buying more pipe insulation to help the heat tape work a little better.

We have only had the pipes freeze once before, and they did burst then.  We have made a lot of improvements since then so I didn’t think we would have this problem.  So we hooked up a tank deicer that Tom’s cousin gave him many years ago.  It didn’t come with the cage and we had never used it before, but it seemed like a good idea to have some thawed water for the animals.  So we used one of our metal animal cages for this.  It is jury-rigged, but it works.

I noticed the sheep had white mouths.

Unfortunately the older sheep in the pen were pretty cold this morning and less interested in eating.  In their pen they couldn’t access the sunshine to help warm up.  So I let them out of their pen into the main barn where there are sunbeams that they went to lay in.  Sadly right now it is starting to cloud up so their sun beams have disappeared.  I hope they warmed up enough for another cold night.

I am enjoying the icicles though.

And here is the view of our farmhouse in the sunshine.  It is pretty even though it is deadly.

I wore myself out lugging water buckets, busting ice and shoveling snow.  I am completely exhausted so sitting on the couch with our beagle, our cat, my laptop and a warm blanket, taking it easy.  Wish us luck getting through this.