Considering the weather that we are having here in East Texas right now, I'm actually happy that I got Covid when I did. I'm probably 99% right now. I still have a slight weeze in my breathing when I exert myself, but it's nothing serious. I just notice it when I'm done doing whatever it is that I was doing.
With the temps below freezing and so much snow on the ground, just walking to the barn and back is a workout. Our water lines to the barn are froze, so I'm carrying it in a 5 gallon bucket. We have heaters in our water tanks and waterers, but the only way to keep them full is by carrying that bucket out there. I'm doing this three times a day. Two buckets at a time that are filled with about 4 gallons of water.
Before I got the Covid, I had cut and split about a cord of firewood. I also had quite a few rounds cut and sitting there that I needed to split, but didn't have the strength or energy to deal with. Two weeks ago, I split and stacked all of those rounds. Now that we've been burning wood non stop, I'm really happy that I did that.
Yesterday morning we set a new all time record for the coldest day ever in recorded history for my County at -6F. The previous record goes back to 1930. Our high temps have been in the 20's and my wife and I are keeping busy feeding animals a lot of extra food so they can deal with the cold. I stocked up on feed last week, so that's worked out well.
The song birds are really getting hit hard by the cold and the snow not melting like it normally does. My wife has been obsessed with making sure all of her bird feeders are full, and then a bunch more to the ground for them. We've only found one dead sparrow in the snow, so we think it's helping. We have never seen anything close to this many birds in our yard. Normally we might have a couple dozen, now there are hundreds of them!!!!
We had 20 baby chicks in our barn that where relying on heat lamps to stay warm. I ran a cord from my generator to keep the lights going, but after doing that for two days, we moved them into our upstairs bedroom where it's 66 degrees. That was a lot more work then I imagined. I think that everything you do in the snow is 3 times harder then doing it without snow!!!
Now that they baby chicks are safe, we turned off the generator during the day. The power went out Monday morning and only came on a few times that day for half an hour at a time. Tuesday was better. We actually had power for a full 2 hours in the evening. It turns out that our internet is also on the same power grid as we are, so when we lose power, we lose internet. Thankfully our cell phones are not affected by the power outages.
If I had Covid now, or if I had gotten it in January instead of December, I don' think I would be of any use right now. The amount of energy that I have now compared to then is night and day. My wife would being doing everything, and nothing would stop her, which means she would be killing herself having to deal with the farm all by herself.
We have two more days of freezing temps, then it's all done on Saturday. The mud will be horrible, but also a relief with the snow going away. Both of us are off this week. Most of Texas is closed. The roads are frozen with a layer of ice on the pavement and almost a foot of snow on top of the ice. We measured 8 inches of snow on Monday, and we're at 3 inches so far today.
Here are a few pictures that I took today now that it's warmed up to 26 degrees outside.
