Winter Won!

We were waiting on winter and a few weeks ago I announced that the wait was over.  Well, that was only the opening act.  On Dec 20, we got hammered by a storm that rivaled The Big One of '06.  This storm left 8-12" of snow and was accompanied by 40-50 mph winds.  Snow blew into every building we own except the storage container.  Our hay was buried in several feet of snow, the skid steer was buried in snow, drifts reached up almost to the roof, the propane tank was buried, snow got under the roof in both the house and shop, and so on and so forth.

Here's a video taken during the storm:

I had to crawl up on the roof during the storm to knock ice off the heater vent.  That worked for awhile but around evening, the heater started short cycling.  Nothing we could do then but shut the heat off.  We only got down to 50 overnight and the next day, with the storm over and the sun shining, I climbed back up and removed the vent cap to find the pipe full of snow and ice.  I really need to figure out a way to keep this from happening again, but the only way to really test solutions is during a storm.

I try different things during each storm and this time I tried putting a horse trailer in front of the hawk house to see if it would change the swirls and keep the hawk house from filling up with snow.  It didn't work.  What happened instead was that the horse trailer got pinned in by drifts and I couldn't get it away from the hawk house.  I had backed it in, but after the storm there was a huge drift in front so I couldn't get the truck in to pull the trailer back out.  I could pull it at an angle but it was going to pivot and there was danger of the rear hitting the hawk house.  I wanted to move the trailer because it was blocking the sun and a) the falcon needs sun, b) sun helps the snow inside melt.  Long story short, I got it out although I creased the metal a little.  Oh well, I can take that panel off and straighten it up.

Inside the barn!

The hawk house and trailer

Back yard drift

Derek on drift against house

Scale house full of snow

Bryan on the roof

Fortunately, after the storm the sun came out and the temperature went up to the 50's.  There's still a lot of snow out there but a lot of it has melted (creating a muddy mess everywhere!).  Life's just always exciting here!

On The Davidic Front we have good news!  David has been responding to steroids and his blood levels have remained stable and actually increased a little bit, for the first time EVER.  He dropped to about 6.8 g/dL but at the next test was up to 7.5 and stayed there for a week.  Our doctors said to let it go 2 weeks and then test him again.  He certainly feels a lot better and his appetite has literally tripled.  Steroids, of course, are not a cure but they have bought us some time and breathing space.  The plans are still to do a bone marrow transplant.  A very few people go into remission after steroids, though, and we're hoping for something along those lines.  For now, though, we're grateful for this improvement.