Weather related, our poor animals, Mama and Allie

When I walked out of the apartment to get into the car yesterday morning at 5 a.m. everything was frozen over with a half inch of ice so I went back into the apartment to wait until daylight to leave for work. At daylight things did not look much better so I stayed home and worked from there. Mama got a taste of what I deal with through my days in the office as she overheard conversations I had with those who called me to get help with various issues.

I have to admit that I did not get as much done working from home as I would normally get done in the office. One problem was the internet connection. Every time I got logged onto the company server the connection would fail within a few minutes. So I would have to download or upload a file and hope the connection lasted long enough to get that done. I lost count of the number of times I had to log in.

The weather was particularly bad yesterday. It never rained per se, but there was a heavy mist or drizzle throughout the entire day and the temperatures never got above freezing. The wind was steady at about fifteen miles per hour so there was a layer of ice on every exposed surface. The cattle did not venture out of the shelter of the calf barn all day and the horse stayed beside her shelter through the day as well. It was a very dull, cold day. Ourpoor animals.

Today is predicted to be more of the same but conditions will improve dramatically over the next couple days with the daytime highs reaching seventy degrees by Sunday. All the moisture will move away from our area and we will see “abundant sunshine” back in the forecast by tomorrow afternoon. People are talking like they have never seen weather like this but we are repeating weather patterns that were not unusual several decades past.

All in all, we have gotten over an inch of precipitation over the past week. That was the last time I emptied the rain gauge and yesterday it had a little over an inch of water in it that had been slowly gathering over this past week. That was little startling to me. I never expected the accumulation would be that high from several days of continual drizzle.

The only good part of the ground being frozen is that the dogs do not get muddy while they are outside doing what they need to get done outside of the house. Today will end that little reprieve. As things thaw it will be messy for a day of two then we will revert to the normally dry and dusty conditions we are used to. The dogs are terrible confused. Some days they are caught, wiped down and generally assaulted at the door while on other days they can come right in and hop into their spot in the chair or couch without any attention. Poor dears!

Allie, Mama’s little rescue Dachshund, has taken on a hunter spirit. She will run down to the calf barn where the hay is stored and scoot under the entire stack, wiggly among the pallets the hay is sitting on a to hunt the rabbits that have unwisely taken up residence there. One morning Mama thought she was stuck so she started unstacking the hay above where she could hear Allie’s muffled cry.

About the time she had thrown aside her tenth bale of hay, she heard a yelp behind her. She almost hit Allie with the last bale thrown aside. She was not a happy camper. She promised she will never go to that much trouble again, but I do not expect that to be a promise she will keep if ever there is a perceived danger in the future.

What we do for these dogs always amazes me.