The Last 36 Hours...
...have not been fun.
Whatever the "bug" is that I seemed to have acquired last Friday has certainly been making me miserable. Suffice to say that I was in the bathroom every two hours throughout the night, pretty much like clock-work. The Kidling and trixstir show no symptoms of anything, so it seems to be something that only I was exposed to. Maybe something I ate, or maybe it'll hit them next... :/
It's cold. Bitterly cold outside. How cold? It's currently -33°c outside, with a windchill taking it down to -41°c. It is expected that the windchill will go down to -45°c later tonight. It could get worse, of course. Last Winter we had temperatures in the -40's, with windchills into the -50s and 60's. That's cold!!!
Trixstir phone from the bowling alley this afternoon to tell me that the furnace in the machine-area isn't working. I finally got her to climb up on a ladder to check that the pilot is still lit, and it is. For some reason, even though the thermostat is calling for heat, the valve isn't opening, and thus the furnace is not firing up. I was going to head over this afternoon to have a look at it, but apparently that wasn't meant to be.
I was paying some bills, and when I reached over to file one of them in its folder, I felt the all-too-familiar stabbing pain of something going out in my lower back. That was (and is) bad enough on its own, but there was to be more. When I tried to get out of the yard, my Explorer just sat there and spun its wheels. Or more correctly, it sat there and spun a wheel. The miracle of the Rear Differential might make it possible for your vehicle to go around corners without hopping all over the road, but it also means that you get stuck if one wheel is sitting on an icy patch and the other is not. Unless you have a locking differential, all of the power goes into the wheel that can move - in this case, the wheel sitting on the icy patch. So that wheel will sit there and spin on the ice, while you just sit there and curse.
Trying to dig out the other wheels was useless, because even though they're clear now, it doesn't solve the problem of that wheel sitting on the slick ice. Sand would fix it, or just about anything else that could give you some traction, but by then I was in no mood to deal with it, and my back was hurting even more. The diesel truck has working 4-wheel drive, but since I can't trust it not to stall out on me, I can't use it either until I find out what's wrong with it. Plus, it hadn't been plugged in (the Explorer had) and there's no way it would start in this frigid cold without being plugged in for a few hours first. I can't take much of this business of not having a reliable 4x4 vehicle. This winter and last have been unusual for the area, according to the locals.
The normal snowfall around here is just a few inches. I remember when we first bought this place; We came out a few times during the winter, and there was never more than 3 or 4 inches of snow on the ground. The last two winters we've had three or four feet of snow on the ground! I realized this morning as I walked back to the house from feeding the horses, that the path I was walking on was at least two feet higher than the actual ground, because it was about even with the second rung on the horses' corral-panels. I really hope that the neighbour comes to help dig us out soon, or it will wind up being too late.
Right now, I'm just hoping that my back loosens up again by morning. I really don't want to have another episode of constant pain for the next several weeks. :\