Winter

[sheepdog 10]

Oh, don?t even talk to me this year about global warming! This has been one long cold, and miserable winter. I will be ever so grateful to see spring arrive. Which leads me to the following list. Thought I?d take a clue from the David Letterman show and do my own version of 10 things I hate the most about winter.No. 10 Frozen water pipes. You wake up first thing in the morning and your mouth is dry as the Sahara Desert and no water to rinse it out with, nor any water to make that first glass of ice tea, which contains the caffeine you need to maintain life it?s self. If you survive that, when you get to the kennel and everything is frozen there too, and no matter what chore you try to do you discover you can?t do it without water. No. 9Frozen dog and other critter?s water dishes. You have to know just exactly how much water they will drink in a day, or before it will freeze, so you don?t overfill the pans so you can at least water them for a couple days until you have to resort to number 8No. 8 Carrying their pans inside to heat on the stove because they won?t thaw out any other way. Then you have to pick up all those blocks of ice with your poor frozen fingers and haul them outside to dump somewhere that you won?t be tripping over them until the spring thaw. No. 7 Frozen water hoses, so it?s a royal pain to thaw out and refill all those frozen water dishes. At least if the water is running, you can flip the ice filled pans upside down and run water on the back of them, which will make the ice pop out, unless of course the hired help has been resorting to beating the pans on the ground to remove ice, which dents up the pans and then the ice is impossible to get out, unless of course, you resort back to reason no. 8. No. 6Hauling buckets of water by hand out to the animals because the hose is frozen. Seems like no matter how carefully you stretch out the hoses when you?re done so they can drain and not freeze before you need them the next time, they somehow manage to occasionally retain just enough water to stop them up real good. Then you have to drag them inside, try to coil them up in the bathtub and run hot water over them, that is, providing the hot water inside is not frozen up too. If the tub water is frozen up, you have to lay them out in the floor, so when they thaw out they make big puddles in the floor you have to mop up. No. 5All that extra laundry. Lets face it, you can wad up a tank top and pair of shorts in one hand, which is all I wear in the summer, but you can fill the washing machine in short order when your daily outfit consists of T shirt, sweat shirt, sweat pants, long johns, socks, jacket, hat, gloves, etc. No. 4 Having to spend 10 minutes getting dressed to go outside. Pile on those layers to avoid frost bitten body parts, and by the time you get all of it on the boots have to be put on last and by then you can barely bend over to pull them on your feet. By the time your all dressed up your nearly too tired to actually go do something. (lets not even get into the frequent urination thing) No. 3Ice and snow! You just can?t believe the amount of aggravation these 2 cause. You have to remember where you put the water hoses so you can find them under the snow. Ice coats all the gate latches, you literally have to fight your way into the dog pens. Snow on the roofs of the dogs houses weighs a ton, and you have to lift up the tops to put feed inside the house. Snow hides the poop, ice freezes it down, so even if you can find it you would need to take a pickaxe to it before you can scoop it up. Of course, there?s the constant fear of slipping and breaking some important body part. Around here there are no safe landing zones for falling down. Any fall could result in my being impaled on a fence post or cracking my skull on concrete. No. 2Winter storms taking out the electric power. Let?s face it, in this day and age you can?t do much of anything without electric. We have taken every precaution we can, we have a small generator that can run part of the place at a time, so we can switch it around like to run the well pump for awhile, or the house when all the watering is done. We also got one of those vent less gas heaters in the kennel that works without electric to keep it a little warmer inside, though it isn?t much help when I have newborns and can?t use the heat lamps and pads. We heat the house with an outdoor wood furnace, it doesn?t work the best without electric to run the fan, but it will warm the house somewhat. And the number 1 thing I hate about winter??The propane and electric bills!!! Heating the building with propane is bad enough, but to add insult to injury, our electric bill nearly doubles with all the heating pads, and heat lamps the newborn pups need. This year really sucked down the propane. I keep the thermostat set fairly low, around 60, but even at that rate in just a few days over a month we burned up over $400 in propane.

[Mich 0]

Woot! Woot! Used to have all the same problems when we had a horse farm. I can relate to all the frozen pipes, hoses and (in our case) buckets of water for the horses. We used sturdy plastic 10 gallon buckets and created huge ice cubes all over that didn't melt til well into spring. LOL Eventually we did have the advantage of a heat element in the water trough. That kept the surface of the water open so the horses could drink. What a wonderful invention. I had to use snow shoes to get out to the barn to feed, tho. Edited May 21, 2012 by moderator (see edit history)

[Iniyila 2]

I like winter but if i say what i like about it and what i hate here i can give a list :Things i hate about winter :1. The car damage, this happens in all winters, when you want to go out and there is snow on the road even if you do not hit anything which in the most times with careful driving you don't, your car needs a general maintenance after winter because the whole snow and other things which come with it like sands and little woods goes into the car from under the bonnet and they really damage the whole body and cause many failures in that time or after that when spring comes. this will cost you a lot and this is just annoying that you have to pay for things that have been done by winter snow.2. Being late in every where you want to go, when it rains or snows then huge traffic happens in all of streets with just few cars because they have to go very slow and be careful to not hit each other and this means that going to a shop to get what you need takes you a lot more than the time you need to do that in spring. for example some day i went to buy some light bulbs from a shop which was about 3km far from our house, this process takes about 15-20 minutes in a normal day but in that day as huge snow was on the road i had to drive so careful and suddenly i stuck in a place which height of snow on the asphalt was about 25cm and even with a 4WD car i completely stuck in there, and when i was finally with help of some peoples get out of that situation and i get back to home it was night ! and so the process took me 9 hours and this is not funny at all.3. The house needs a lot of maintenance after each winter, the roof need to be repaired and sometimes you have to repaid it during the winter itself which is just very hard and sometimes it takes days to be repaired. sometimes you will face huge problems in house like electrical failure and many other things and you should repair the failure in the snow.4. The most hating part is none of above, it is catching a cold. this is really bad when you get seek and you feel you can not move from your bed and you hardly can eat anything, some times you catch a cold and you can do your daily works but sometimes it is just so stronger than what you thought and it makes you a complete rock in you bed without any movement, now just imagine that your roof starts to break when you are seek and you have to fix it before it comes down on your head so just imagine the pain , thanks god this winter we faced a little problems and they solved very easily, so i can say this was a good winter and i really enjoyed it.But what i like about winter is all the things except those i said above, winter is beautiful and gives you the chance to be more with your family in those days which no one can get out because of huge snow. you can drink hot coffee and enjoy it more than any other time like summer, you can also go out and jump in the snows and play with your friends or your dog. so winter is beautiful but it can cause many problems too.