Mother Nature's Final Play

These are the trees after some of it melted

In a last ditch effort to put the cherry on top of a horrible year, Mother Nature has brought in so much freezing rain, that the whole town in which my barn is located has no power.  And the power company doesn't expect to get power out there until the end of the week.  Which means that thousands of people spent Christmas in the dark.

Including my horse.

Which of course means no water.

The barn manager spent the first two days of the power outage lugging buckets back and forth from a river down the road.  I thought this was very Laura Ingalls Wilder of her, but apparently, it is quite the procedure.

The river is over a drop, so they throw a giant barrel over with a rope, which then fills up, and it takes two of them to pull it back over the side.  They put it in the back of the tractor, and fill a bunch of other barrels the same way.  Apparently they have to do this 3-4 times a day.

And to make matters worse, I wasn't around to help, which makes me feel really really really bad.  I already feel like I don't fit in much at the barn, which can usually be remedied at any barn with some good old fashioned free manual labour, but it being Christmas, I went home to visit family.

Anyway, after about two days of that, the barn owner went out and got a generator.  Now all the horses have their automatic water back, but nothing else.  Apparently they have to keep all the horses inside because the only thing keeping the pipes from freezing is the body heat of 25 horses.

So Walker is living like Dracula in the pitch black barn.

At least Santa found him.  I hope he found all of you too!