Sunday, January 26-Brrrrrrrrr!

Checking in this afternoon at a balmy 19* and will be cooling fast as the sun, brief as it was, will be setting soon. This last polar blast has not been kind to our old pipes. Thursday night I was doing some dishes before bed and the water just slowly ran out until there was nothing but air. I hurriedly put my boots on, bundled up and grabbed a flashlight and headed out to the pump house. As I uncovered the box surrounding the pump I immediately noticed that the plastic around the pressure switch had melted from the heat lamp. I assumed that was the problem, thinking easy fix, just replace the switch. But äs we all know it is seldom as easy as we would like. The plumber arrived Friday around 2 at which time we noticed 2 broken pipes that were frozen solid. I swear I had not noticed those the night before. We had to break out the heaters and start thawing. The plumber came back around 5 and within 2 hours he had the pipes replaced and the water on. Just in time for Matt, Sara and Evie's arrival. Poor Evie seemed to have a touch of the flu all day Saturday and slept most of the day. And then, after two loads of laundry, I realized that the drain was frozen in the utility room and was running under the carpet and into the crawl space. The good thing is that as long as I don't do any laundry the problem doesn't appear to get worse.
This afternoon as it warmed up, funny how 25 can be seen as warming up, we went outside to play in the snow.

Friday, January 17

If you are reading this then you obviously survived the cold spell that greeted us as we entered the year of 2014!  We were quite fortunate as we never lost power and thanks to the heat lamps in our pump house, none of our pipes froze.  We did have the pump go out on our hot tub right before New Years Day, but our hot tub guy got out and wisely drained the tub while the pump was getting fixed.  Had he not done that I have no doubts that we would be buying a new hot tub now.

Retired Teachers Luncheon at Bennans Loft in London

It seems a little quite around here now that everyone is back home after the holidays.  Sara, Matt and Evelyn have been up for the weekends while Matt is building a dining room table.  We have enjoyed those visits and they are keeping Mr. Bichler busy.  We purchased a carport before Christmas so we would have a little more room to store some of our yard equipment that will not fit into the barn.  We finally got 5 tons of gravel last week and have been busy leveling it out and preparing it for the building.  They called yesterday and will be out next Friday to put it up.  I hope the weather cooperates and everything goes as planned.

The male of a pair of Flicker woodpeckers that have been frequenting my feeder

My most recent painting, "Whale Watch"

Sharon and I have decided to go with the Hilliard UMC Habitat for Humanity group to Mobile, Alabama at the end of February.  This is the same group that we worked with on our trip to Dubois, Pennsylvania.  We decided that it might be fun to build something as opposed to tearing things up.  I just hope that our building skills are up to par or perhaps someone will be tearing out what we build.  When we first discussed going down we talked about staying an extra week and driving to Florida for some added sunshine.  I mentioned that I would like to go west and perhaps visit New Orleans and the gulf coast along Texas.  The birding in that area is supposed to be wonderful this time of the year.  Well, before you could say "ROAD TRIP", Sharon had sent me a make-shift itinerary taking us to 4 National Parks, the Oklahoma City Memorial and visits to at least 4 states that we have never been to.  As a side note she added that it might actually take closer to two weeks to complete this add on trip.  So we are now in "planning mode" which is great for me as I love preparing for a trip.  I think that I enjoy the preparation almost as much as the trip itself.  We initially told ourselves that we were going to be a little less structured and not really make any reservations.  Kind of "fly by the seat of our pants" so to speak, but that is proving a little more difficult than we thought.  We just realized that the day we are going to be in New Orleans is just 2 days before Mardi Gras and they evidently start celebrating 3 weeks in advance.  Even the campgrounds are booked for the weekend of March 1,2.

Stay tuned for more trip blogs.  We will try to post pictures of our week in Mobile as well as our tour through Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennesee and Kentucky!