Weathering the Weather

Brrr, it was only 6 degrees this morning and had risen to 8 degrees by the time we walked. I thought this snow was unusual but check out the picture taken 6 years ago:

We have just as much snow now on the ground as we did on Nov 12th, 2013, it is just much colder this year. As I went to step out, there was a dog on our patio waiting to get in. A picture of the dog was taken and posted on the Hanna City Happening Facebook page.

 Emma was not too happy but the dog was friendly. This dog went on our walk with us happy to be running with Ruth's German Shepard Farkash, Joan's dog Kabur and Mom's dog Molly.  On the walk is when I discovered the big problems of the day. The weanling paddock waterer was frozen and the paddock was empty! All 6 weanlings were gone. The back gate to the shelter had just a cheap snap and a chain holding it and the entire chain was gone.  The chain is probably buried in the snow. A bucket of grain was grabbed, the back gate tied shut with a rope, the front gate left wide open with grain in each of their buckets and off I went on the golf cart to find them. I was able to follow their tracks in the snow and saw where they stopped to graze, saw where they ran through the fields in a big circle, saw they did not go into the woods and finally saw where they found a downed fence and left the field. The neighboring farmer hit the corner post with his equipment and took down an entire section of fence. Those hoofprints in the snow headed straight north through the harvested corn fields, crossing a road and into another harvested corn field and then off in the distance there they were all 6 of them just standing near a barn, just not OUR barn. They all came running when I called. Lyra was attached to the lead rope and tied to the golf cart and they all followed back to their paddock where they were rewarded with their breakfast grain. It took an hour and a half of searching then another few hours working on the next problem of frozen water. The 75 gallon water tank was cleaned out and moved into their paddock and about 10 five gallon buckets of warm water dumped in.  I didn't want to fill the tank, I don't have a heater for it.  The hair dryer was brought out and plugged in to start defrosting the automatic waterer except when it defrosted enough a hose inside the waterer started spraying water. I was able to get that leak down to a trickle then called Mike to let him know we would need to get that repaired.  Then a lot of the day was spent hauling wood inside for the wood burner and water for the weanlings.  The cold sure makes life hard.
Mike came over after work and worked on repairing the leaks in the waterer but we were missing a part but got the heater working. He went tonight to buy a new part, came back to find the heater had tripped the gfi outlet again. He gave the weanlings 3 more buckets of water and I'll check them first thing in the morning. We have to figure out what is making that brand new outlet trip. Last year we hired Meister Electric to put in a brand new electric line and we put in a brand new automatic waterer all so that we would a trouble free automatic waterer for this winter!