Cold again: only 5 F this morning

A taxonomy of cold weather clothing, by increments, while feeding the sheep and doing other farm work each morning:

At freezing (32 F), we can walk out in our comfy no-one's-coming-to-see-us-today clothes, sweat shirt and sweat pants and Crocs, without injury, except that we may get a little bit of hay or chickie-shit on us. The main thing to worry about is mud. Substitute wellies for Crocs, and you're all set.

At moderately cool temperatures (20-32 F), we need to put on a coat. I use a double-layered heavy fleece coat made by a Canadian company. I bought it years ago in Canada, and it has lasted well. But the mud is frozen, so you can wear your Crocs if you have thick socks. Except that your wife will yell at you because she worries your worn-out old Crocs will slip on the ice. I tend to think my smooth-soled Crocs stick to the ice better than my boots, but no-one believes me. Take your gloves and hat, but you may take them off later if you don't need them.

Between 10 and 20F, it's too cold for Crocs, and becoming too cold for sweats, even with a coat. I wear felt-lined thermal "Pac" boots, in this case made by LaCrosse, a Canadian company that knows how to keep feet warm. They're expensive, but there's really no adequate substitute. You'll also need to change to warmer clothes if you mean to stay out for more than five minutes. If it's just a night check, and the snow is plowed, I can run out in my sweats and Crocs and run back in without harm, but if it's a longer job, I first change to insulated bib overalls. Gloves and hat are also required for longer jobs. You can take your gloves off for a short length of time to do more delicate jobs, like fixing wiring on the trailer, or tightening a bolt. But not for long. Fingers will get cold fast.

Below 10 F, insulated overalls are a must for just about any length of time, especially if the wind is blowing. Warm socks too. We use thermal liners with thick wool oversocks in our felt-lined boots. Gloves stay on nearly all the time, as does the hat. Fingers will now stick to bare metal, so best keep your gloves on, even when handling tools. I have liner gloves I can wear under my main gloves, which allows me to take the main gloves off for a few minutes to do finer fingery types of work. But for the most part, if it's this cold, I just don't do those kinds of jobs outside until it warms up.

Between -10 F and  0 F, we wear our gloves and hat and insulated overalls and felt boots and double layer of socks. We may add a long sleeved, thicker undershirt, and switch to our warmer pair of gloves, which are made by Carhartt, another good brand name for cold weather stuff. All these clothes are cotton or cotton blend, except for the hat, which is wool, and the insulation in the overalls and gloves, which is usually a fiber-based product. In this kind of cold, cotton clothes are fine, if they're thick and strong and designed for the cold. The old outdoor activity adage not to wear cotton no longer applies.

Between -20 and -10 F, we may switch to a fur-lined "mad bomber" hat, as well as a pair of insulated coveralls instead of bib overalls. We keep our inside clothes -- sweat pants and sweat shirt -- on underneath.

Below -20 F it's best not to go out if you can help it, but the sheep will still need to be fed, so you must. I just wear all of the stuff above, but stay out for only as long as I need and come right back in. If I'm working and there's no wind, its fine. If I'm not moving much and there's a wind, you get cold fast. I have a pair of long bright red cotton "combination" underwear that I can add to stay out just a little longer. But it's very easy to freeze skin, especially your fingers, ear lobes, cheeks and nose. I've had frostbite and can recognize the feeling, so I try not to get it again.

It's always nice to come back in to a warm house when it's this cold outside. Our house has multiple and redundant heating systems for safety in case of power cuts, so we're never really cold inside. We usually use the wood stove and a little electrical heat and that's enough especially with good quality hardwood, but if it gets really cold, we can just crank up an oversized oil furnace, and be toasty in minutes.

Here's how to rock this kinda style:

A cold week

Photo: Aimee helping our chickadees survive the cold. These birds are part of the infamous 47%, but they don't cost that much to maintain.

The weather in this part of Maine has been pretty cold since the beginning of the week, thanks to a big bulge of Canadian air.

Heating systems need to work and work well when it's this cold.

Our Post Office lady was complaining yesterday of frozen pipes. Not good. This is an elderly lady, probably around 65 years old or more. I don't know if she has a husband and have never asked, but I feel badly for her if she has to battle frozen pipes with or without a partner.

There have also been a lot of nasty house fires reported on the news. One family of five lost four to the flames in a town just across the Penobscot River from here. The only survivor was the mother. I have no idea what that kind of loss could do to a person, and don't wish to find out, so I've been checking smoke alarm batteries even more regularly than usual.

Another farm lost its barn and chickens to a heat lamp fire. Our chickens might like some heat, but I'm afraid they will have to suffer through without. I'm not risking a barn fire. When the lambs come, they will have to have heat lamps, but we'll check and double check them several times a day.

Another good reason to delay lambing in Maine until April -- to minimize the risk of barn fire from heat lamps.

We've been using oil heat ourselves to heat the Womerlippi farmhouse, which is a pretty good sign of a cold snap. We don't use much of it -- the sight gauge on our oil tank has barely budged since the last time we put any oil in three years ago -- but it helps to keep us sane when we know we can leave the house to go to work and the pipes won't freeze. We continue to use our wood stove and the electrical baseboard heater in our living room, to minimize the oil use and thus the greenhouse gas emissions, but the furnace will come on if the temperature in the house drops below 62 degrees F. And if we come home from work and the house is at 62 degrees F because the fire in the wood stove has died down, we can use the oil furnace to heat everything back up a little faster.

I dislike our central heating system. Not only does it burn oil, but it's also a forced air system, and in a house with two dogs and two cats and a wood stove, that makes for a lot of dust. It's also noisy. So it was with relief that, as the cold snap began to moderate yesterday, I turned it all off, and we've done without since.

In years gone by, we'd have used the large outside wood-fired furnace in the garage, also a forced air system, whenever it was this cold out, but I haven't wanted to use that since the new chimney was found damaged from corrosion two years ago -- the result of crappy work from a local contractor and crappy materials from a national-level supplier.

I never got around to repairing the garage chimney, mostly because this huge machine uses too much wood. It does a great job of heating the house even when it's cold outside, and runs for much longer than the kitchen wood stove without needing to be filled, but it doesn't really help protect the pipes very much, since the air registers are in the wrong place for that, and it doubles or triples our firewood consumption for the year.

We began instead leaving a small electrical heater on much of the time when the weather was cold last year or the year before, and realized after a while that the extra electricity bill from that, around three or four hundred dollars a year, was much less than the six or seven hundred dollars of firewood the large furnace would blow through, even if it was only used for the coldest weather. This electrical heater, which is now a higher quality 115 volt, American-construction baseboard type, since the several Chinese-made oil-filled heaters we previously tried have all failed, sits next to the living room couch where we normally sit. This couch is fully thirty feet and around a corner from the kitchen wood stove. The baseboard puts the heat exactly where we need it, for about a hundred dollars a month if left on all the time.

We'll reuse that outdoor furnace in one or the other of the new buildings we have planned.

Another difficulty has been knowing exactly how cold it is outside. I managed to break our outside thermometer somehow, and replaced it with a cheap hardware store dial thermometer. Some time afterwards I realized that the new thermometer wasn't reading the right temperature, so I went back to the hardware store for another one, and installed them side by side, just to see if I was correct.

 

This confused me even more, since the replacement thermometer read a few degrees differently than the old one, but was still incorrect. It took me a while to figure this out. When the photo above was taken, the actual outside temperature was closer to zero degrees F. You really need to know what the temperature is outside, so you can know when to turn heating systems on or off to protect pipes.

Last year Aimee was sent to the hardware store for greenhouse thermometers and returned with these small electronic ones, so I went out to salvage these, and installed one in our kitchen window. It seems to be working. 

It didn't help any, in this game of Maine winter survival, that late last year I switched out our hot water tank for a tankless heater. The hot water tank, which used to live in the basement, was a supply of heat to the pipes down there. The tankless heater doesn't provide any heat unless the hot water taps are running, and so it doesn't protect the pipes at all when we're not here. I put a heat lamp down there instead, on a thermostatic socket adapter. When the heat lamp is plugged in to the switch, it comes on at 35 degrees F, and doesn't go out until 45 degrees. The socket adapter is less than ideal in this sense, because you can't control the temperature at which it turns on or off, but it adds protection. I also added a good deal of insulation and sealed up a lot of cracks in our basement, making it much warmer in the area where the pipes are.

All this, just because I changed the kind of hot water heater we were using! 

You really need to be on the game, technologically speaking, to survive a Maine winter comfortably. But even then there's an element of luck. Any of these carefully maintained and serviced systems could fail at any time, indeed, as our furnace failed earlier this winter, and cause a fire or frozen pipes.

I feel sorry for our Post Office lady with frozen pipes, and for the people that are having house fires.

But it's kind of fun to sit here in the warmth and read these old diary entries about all the effort we've put into to making this old farmhouse stay warm over the years.

Here's a selection:

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "cold."

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "furnace."

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "snow."

Brass monkey just lost 'em

According to our porch thermometer, it's 25 degrees Fahrenheit below zero out there right now at 4.10 am. That seems correct, too, not a broken thermometer because Bangor Airport, 350 feet lower in altitude, has 22 below.

About minus 33 degrees Celsius here, minus 30 in Bangor.

If our brass monkey was equipped, they just cracked off.

All through the woods, trees are popping and even exploding. The pops are sort of friendly-sounding, not too scary, but one big explosive crack sent Haggis the dog running for his mum this morning during our regular constitutional.

One of our older hens foolishly began to molt a couple weeks ago, and we'll see later if she made it through the night. The ducks and sheep will be fine; although the ewes are beginning to be uncomfortably pregnant, they're not due for several more weeks, thank heavens. Keeping newborn lambs alive when the weather is this cold can be very hard. They are born wet from amniotic fluid, which prevents their coats from working, and have to dry off before they can regulate their heat. They can go into hypothermia so every easily and just sort of drift off mildly, if you don't get them in the house and under the wood stove.

Poor little buggers. There's probably green fields in Yorkshire or Wales right now, places where lambs belong. (Although I hear it's been cold in Britain too.).

We won't see green until late April.

The oil furnace thermometer base temperature was reset a little higher last night to keep the frost off the two water pipes that run very close to the sill under the east side of the kitchen. There's a hot air duct in that space, just a four-inch one, but it does the job if you let the furnace do its job by keeping the thermostat at a sensible setting. Keep it set too low and the wood stoves will do the job instead. They don't have ducts pointing at the pipes. I also have a four-inch duct pointed right at my hot water heater and all the rest of the pipes. And my basement is sealed tight.

The one pipe I can't reach is the main supply pipe from the well. Maybe it's time to run the tap a little. It wouldn't hurt to do that for the sake of the well pump too.

The pressure tank and well pump are in a concrete space in the garage, heated with a 60 watt rough-duty incandescent bulb. I just re-covered that whole space with a new hinged, insulated lid and frame.

We ought to get through this with pipes intact. We'd better. Once they freeze, they'll stay that way for the winter unless we dig them up.

I expect some of our friends and neighbors will see their pipes freeze tonight.

The other thing that doesn't like to work in this kind of cold is a car battery. The electrochemical reaction that causes the power to flow slows right down in the cold. We keep 12 V battery packs for starting recalcitrant cars. And then engines themselves. Oil is the consistency of slow honey or even jelly, and despite what the manufacturers say about not needing to warm up the engine, I always give it at least ten minutes.

Outdoor plastic, in this cold, becomes brittle like glass, and will shatter. We've been using some plastic rope handle tubs for firewood lately, but they're not up to it, and an even slightly thrown or dropped log goes clear through.

Finally, this is a great time to weatherize your house from the inside, because with a 40-dollar laser thermometer you can find every tiny seep of cold air coming in, and every cold patch on a wall where the insulation has failed inside the wall. This time of year my wife thinks it's funny how obsessed with that thermometer I am, trying to find and fix the leaks that have so far eluded me.

So those are the sports we engage in and the sights and sounds of a Maine cold snap around the Womerlippi place.

Jump-starting a lamb: On intubation and related matters

Jewel with lambs last spring in the lambing jug


This is a supplement to the previous post, in which I mentioned having an intubation kit handy in case you would need it, but failed to mention when or why or how to use it.

Intubation int his context is "tube-feeding" or force feeding a new-born lamb who is failing to thrive.

Newborns have wet coats, from the amniotic fluid. They need to dry their coats to stay warm, especially if they are born in a Maine winter. If they don't dry their coats, and the weather is even slightly cold, they will die very easily of hypothermia. You can lose a significant number of your newborns this way. This is why we put so much emphasis on ram separation in the fall of the year -- that's the way you delay parturition, by delaying breeding or "tupping." And it's also why we think early lambing in Maine, even to make sheep shows and sales, or Easter lambs, is bad practice: bad for the animals, that is.

When you get a cold newborn lamb, there's a sequence of increasingly drastic actions. What the lamb needs is warmth and food, and you have to make sure it is getting both.

First, check for a suckling response. Stick your (hopefully clean) finger in the lamb's mouth. If the mouth is warm and the lamb suckles strongly, it can likely feed if you just get it to the nipple. The ewe likely has plenty of milk, so milk some directly into the lamb's mouth. Hopefully your aim is good. Or stuff the nipple into the lamb's mouth and then strip some milk. If the lamb swallows the milk, and if you get enough in, and if you have a heat lamp providing adequate warmth, that may be all you need to do. If the lamb can't find the nipple, or suckle, on its own the next time it needs to feed, in an hour or so, repeat the process. Eventually it should get stronger and find the nipple on its own.

Lambs are equipped with a built-in shepherd's feeding alarm called a tail. If the tail is wagging, the lamb is feeding and all is well!

If there's no response, and the inside of the mouth is cold, make sure the animal is breathing and the respiration rate has not already dropped so low that it is beyond saving. I can't tell you where to draw the line, but a lamb making only a handful of weak, shallow breaths a minute, that is cold to the touch, and cold in the mouth, is likely not going to make it.

Hopefully you catch your lamb before it gets to this stage. As soon as we find a cold lamb that has a cold mouth and a weak or non-existent sucking response, we know we have to bring it in to the house. We start by putting the lamb under the wood stove where the temperature is 80-90 degrees F, for a few minutes. Then, keeping close to the stove for continued warmth, we try to bottle-feed some colostrum replacer, pre-warmed, just like a baby's bottle. We use a soda bottle with a big lamb nipple on. If the lamb has only a weak suckling response, we squirt some slowly down the throat, making sure not to choke the lamb. If it suckles and feeds, however inexpertly, all will be well soon. A couple of ounces of warm colostrum replacer and another twenty minutes under the stove to dry off and warm up, is all the lamb needs. The lamb will usually perk up and look around, and can soon go back with mother, with you taking care to check the heat lamp is providing warmth.

If you can't get milk in the lamb with a bottle, if the lamb is breathing but cold and limp, that's when you intubate. You get the intubation kit from outlets like Sheepman's Supply. We use our butcher block table to do the deed comfortably.

The intubation kit consists of a smooth tube with a funnel-like apparatus. First, unless it's brand new and still in a sterile wrapper, sterilize the tube and funnel by heating in a pot of water to 160 degrees, and airdrying. Do this ahead of time, putting the equipment in a new Ziploc bag for storage.

The tube is slid down the oesophagus, and milk is funneled into the lamb. To make it work, and not kill the lamb, the tube has to be in the stomach, not the lungs.

First, lubricate the tube with a little clean warm water.

Then, "adopt the position."

The way you get the tube into the stomach first time, every time, is to stretch out the lamb's neck and head so it's a straight shot. Slide the tube carefully and slowly into the lamb's mouth as far as it will go without any restrictions. Never force the tube in. It should slip in gently. For medium-sized breeds like our Corriedale crosses, it's about a six-inch trip down there for the tube. Any choking reflex means you pull out quickly and start over. Generally, if the tube is six inches or more into the lamb, and the lamb is breathing but not choking, you have probably hit the stomach.

Once the tube is in, and the lamb stable, attach the funnel and gently, slowly, pour in a couple ounces of warm (around 95 degrees F), fairly dilute, colostrum replacer. You can lift up the lamb's head and neck a bit to let gravity help. If you get any choking or overflow, you have put in too much, so stop.

As soon as you have got some milk in the lamb, you can slide out the tube, and put the lamb back in that nice warm spot, which for us is under the woodstove. The glucose in the colostrum replacer will start hitting the lamb's bloodstream almost immediately. After five or ten minutes, the lamb should start to fidget, and then start looking around.

Congratulations! You just jump-started a lamb! You are now officially a shepherd, having passed the most basic life-or-death test of shepherd skill and lore.

Especially enjoy that lamb when you see it play. It nearly died, poor bugger.

And next year, keep that ram away from the ewes a few more weeks into fall. If you really want to eat lamb at Easter, use your damn freezer and eat your fall lamb!

If you really want to win a sheep show prize, well, don't. Grow up. Animals are not made for you to build up your weak ego. Try a sport, or take out a lottery ticket, or some other prize-winning activity instead.

PS:
Extra bit of advice from a guest, Colour it Green diary:

we went on a lambing course prior to our first experience and the vet told us to have a go at tubing - afterall, once things are that bad for the lamb what else do you have to lose. we got to practise on dead lambs, which was very useful. when our ewe had triplets last year, we did end up tubing the youngest and the changearound was like a miracle.

One thing we did learn that was useful was to estimate the length of tube from mouth to stomach outside of the lamb before passing the tube in, so you know how much to expect to feed in.

Slight reprieve -- get ready for another!

The thermometer -- we had to buy a new one because all the others had quit -- didn't lift much above zero the last few days, dropping down to -10 or -15 F overnight, and life was a little harder than it needed to be, mostly because the crawl spaces got too cold and so the pipes were threatened, but also because of vehicular and equipment difficulties.

After I discovered a spot at the bottom of the bathroom wall, right next to the toilet, that was frozen solid at 22 degrees F -- inside the house! -- I got busy yesterday with banking plastic and lath, chiseling away the ice from the foundation, putting up new plastic, and then shoveling the snow back for weight and insulation.

It took the rest of the day to drive out the cold from the inside of the house, but by bedtime the cold spot was above freezing and climbing. Today I did the same to another spot that was making one of our food cupboards cold. Aimee was upset that she couldn't pour her honey, poor puss.

The problem was the new building, where I hadn't yet detailed the join to the old. I'd put up insulation board but not plastic like I usually do, and the cold air was still coming in behind the board. Should have known, but I was in a hurry when I did it -- late one night at the end of term. All fixed now, but not without some worry over the pipes.

Another problem was the Land Rover's starter. The bendix drive had quit working, probably because of some ice. The Land Rover is our all-weather human-and-animal emergency vehicle. It has to start. Not starting is not an option.

So I suited up in my best cold weather gear, lay on me poor old back under the truck, and dropped the starter. It took around thirty minutes, for a two-bolt-and-a-wire job that would have taken ten in summer. Then I thawed the grumpy old starter out under the kitchen wood stove, a process that took a long time. There was still hoar frost on it after an hour, even though it's over 120 degrees under the stove. Once thawed, I lubricated it with a little brake fluid, which is still a light oil at temperatures well below zero, refitted it, and got a start.

One down, one to go. But the tractor wouldn't start at all, not even running on kerosene instead of diesel, not even being jumped by the Land Rover's sturdy one-wire genny, so I had Aimee pick up an engine heater on her shopping trip today, the kind that goes in the bottom radiator hose. I'll fit it tomorrow. It's supposed to get sunny and above freezing for the first time in a long time, so it shouldn't be such a difficult job to do.

The chickadees, Maine's state bird, are very busy at the feeder, their lifeline. They've eaten two quarts of sunflower seeds since Monday. They come to the windowsill to "drink" snow to wash the sunflower seeds down, then go back for more, all day long, never mind if it's negative 15 or 50 above.

Here's the chickadee feeder. We fill this thing up every few days, but it all gets eaten very quickly.

The chickies also like to hang in the lilac tree, lots of them fluttering in and out, even though it's still frozen up with ice. Look closely to see one! There were about ten in there when I took the picture, but there's no way to take a shot of ten tiny birds in a very big tree and hope to see anything.

At the other end of the front lawn wild turkeys are gathering to eat apples from our neighbor's tree and to eat grit and sand off the road. They don't seem to mind the cold much either, but they're a lot easier to see, even in the tree. (There are four in this picture.)

Saturday dawned a little warmer. It's 15 F out there right now this afternoon, positively tropical. With another storm forecast for Sunday into Monday, this time supposed to be snow to mix to rain, I wanted to get the house ready. Ice from the big ice storm is still all over all the roofs, now in the form of ice dams, and it's held the snow back. Normally a lot of it would shed. I got busy with the roof rake, pulling as much of the weight of the snow down as I could. It was a good workout. I also opened the attic door and cranked the oil furnace, to help break the ice off of there.

 

Here's the back of the house, with all the equipment storage. You can see that it's all pretty well smothered. I pulled the snow off the garage and the new roof too, not nearly as bad in terms of ice dams, but enough weight that it needed to be moved.

Here's the worst spot, a big ice dam that has taken away the guttering, and a big mess of ice that has come down the main roof gully to the porch roof. This mess probably weights 300 pounds, which the roof can handle now the rest of the weight is gone. But, like the ice dams, it's frozen fast to the roof. I'm hoping the either the sun tomorrow or the rain is warm enough that we can get rid of this, perhaps with some salt to help out. I may have to put the roof edge heater wires back up there, to stop this from happening. I still have a box full of them that used to be on the porch roof, before it was covered with metal roofing.

Could be worse. No great damage or losses so far, touch-wood!

Eight below and all's well

The weatherman forecast a cold day with a strong wind, and we're not disappointed. More of that Canadian air from up around Hudson's Bay.

I went out with Haggis-dog at 5 am so he could piddle, and discovered a full moon so bright I could see color. Moonlight was reflecting all around in the recent snow, which, although it wasn't actually snowing, was making little mini-blizzards in the wind. Tiny whirlwinds of snow in our dooryard. The thermometer read only - 8 F (about -22 C) which is not so terribly cold -- it gets a lot colder around here. But the wind made it feel much worse.

Beautiful, but distinctly unwelcoming.

We hurried back indoors. My morning chore #1 around here is stoking fires. A few logs on each, and we quickly began to warm the house up.

We weren't so cold inside. The oil furnace had come on overnight -- a sign of cold temperatures outside. We set the oil-burner's thermostat to 60 F so that whenever the wood heat slacks off for any reason, the oil burner comes on. This prevents the house from getting that bone-achy kind of cold, and protects the water pipes, without using more than 50 or so gallons of oil a year. If you let a house drop below 55 F in Maine when it's below zero outside, then your basement and crawl spaces will of course be even colder and pipes may freeze. The house will also take a good while to heat back up, during which time you will be miserably uncomfortable.

Our kitchen wood stove, pictured here going full blast after being tended first thing this morning, soon got the kitchen up to 75 F, and a small fan we keep in the door between the kitchen and the rest of the house began to circulate the warm air around. The forced air wood furnace in the garage also soon picked up to full speed, blowing warm air into the upstairs where Aimee is still sleeping.

As far as she's concerned, the heat never dropped below 65F.

But I expect that is my job, to keep the wifie and the indoor critters warm, without them having to think about it.

Today is going to be a bad day for outdoor work. I will have to feed, of course, but I'm glad I changed the livestocks' water earlier in the week, because that means I don't have to do it today. I will have to bring in the wheelbarrow load of firewood we will easily burn through today. The shop is a mess and I have some car work to do, but that optional kind of chore will have to wait until it's a little more sensible kind of weather for that kind of thing.

Kind of.

Even going for a walk with the dogs is probably not such a smart thing to do either, unless you want a dog to lose an ear, or you wish to lose the end of your nose.

So that leaves cooking, cleaning, and knitting. I want to knit. Here's a shot of our knitting machine set-up, with two sweaters in process, one on the machine, another over the chair. Not exactly exercise, but I hope to finish the one on the machine this weekend, preferably by Sunday morning so Aimee can pop it in the wash to shrink a bit. (I made it oversize to allow for this shrinkage.)

I have to confess it took me a long while to get used to cold winters. Mostly, the relative inactivity is hard to get used to. As a fairly ordinary kind of Englishman with regard to my preferred outdoor activity, walking, I sort of naturally expect to be able to take a pleasant walk outside most days of the year, with the only weather inconvenience conspiring to prevent this being rain or mist, or at worst a few inches of temporary snow. And if it is a bit cold on your walk, well, the countryside should sort of naturally be arranged so that there's a nice warm pub with a nice crackling fireplace at the end of it.

But for twenty-two years this generally hasn't been possible for at least a third of each year. The walking part, I mean. The pub part is pretty much out of the question whatever the weather. American has not yet progressed to the level of civilisation (with an "s") where family-friendly pubs are strategically placed at the ends of countryside walking paths.

Now that's what I mean by rural planning.

But of course if you live where we do, you can always take a walk. We have thousands of acres of forest right up to our backyard. It's just that for quite a bit of the year you might not enjoy it very much.

Back in the day, when I was frequently an instructor on the RAF Mountain Rescue Service's famous winter mountaineering course, we would go each year, of course, to Coire an t'Shneachda and the other northern corries on the Cairngorm plateau, to access the easy, beginner's-level snow and ice climbs, to train our latest batch of young droogs in the lore of snow and ice climbing and associated rescue practices.

I swear, it was nearly always warmer there than it is in my dooryard today, and most of each winter.

Stack effect

I had been frustrated recently by the fact that even after our rather assiduous insulation efforts, this old house was still not keeping heat as well as I would like it to this winter.

The evidence for this is in the firewood pile, which has been going away just as fast as it usually does. I want to slow this combustion down.

So I went on a mission, before the Superbowl, to seal up air gaps. One of the items I teach is how to calculate building heat load, and so am very familiar with the general injunction to fix the building envelope first, then do the insulation. But when we went through this house, before we moved in, we did new drywall all around, placed new foam board insulation under the new drywall, and put in new windows all around, so I had always thought that the place was about as tight as I should get it. There were a couple air leaks I knew about, but you shouldn't make a house heated by wood too tight.

Well, I was wrong. The remaining air leaks were large, and now I fixed them it's a lot more comfortable in this place.

I started with a window that had a saggy vinyl frame on one side. I put in shims and closed the gap. Then I caulked up a couple of cracks in our two old kitchen doors.

Next I switched to insulation. The cellar-head space, which is also the space behind the stairs, had never been insulated, although the cellar ceiling had R 19 fiberglass I put in three years ago to keep the downstairs floor warm. I put R 19 below the staircase and on one wall and watched the inside temperature of that wall, measured with the laser thermometer, climb from 59 F to 65 F. I need a bit more R 19 to finish the job. I think I may detail it with foam board over the glass, too, so the R 19 can't sag.

Then I put clear caulk on the gaps between the stair treads and the wall, preventing cold air coming up from the cellar this way. Standing on the second or third step of the cellar stairs, I saw light through a big gap under the cellar door threshold. Some spray foam took care of that.

Finally, standing over the floor vents for the old forced air oil furnace, I could feel cold air gently rising. I measured the temperature of this air at 47 F. Each vent is about a square foot of air gap! I knew that this mostly disused furnace was a source of cold air, but I never realized quite how much.

Aimee had some magnetic plastic stick-on sheets for keeping dog hair out of the vents in the summer. I went to get these and covered up all but one cold air return and two of the smaller vents.

The combination of these treatments, but especially the vent closing, was impressive. Almost immediately the downstairs began to climb from a stable 65 F to 70 F.

This is the 'stack effect" where hot air escaping though the chimneys and any cracks and gaps at the top of the house draws cold air in from below, in this case through the furnace. It also helps to explain why turning the furnace on for just ten minutes makes such a big difference to the comfort level in the house.

I would like to shut off all the durn furnace vents, but I'm worried that the basement will get too isolated from the rest of the house if I do that. We have a propane hot water tank and a lot of water pipes down there, and the more sealing and insulation I put between the main house and the basement, the less protected they are. I also have air ducts serving the basement itself, and I don't think I can stop using them.

The basement is cold. It's the dead of winter and old man frost has reached into the ground about as far as he will go. The basement walls, which are crude masonry and concrete, read from 23 F in the coldest spot, up high, where there's no soil protection, to 39 F in the warmest, down below. The air temperature is steady at about 35 F. Any air in those basement duct work is going to be chilled down. And if the stack effect means air is drawn through the duct work even when the furnace is not operating, that will just make things worse. The propane burner heats up the place where all the pipes are, which helps a good deal, and the pipes themselves are copper and conduct heat away from the propane tank nicely, but 35 F is still marginal.

When I reorganized the forced air vents to the kitchen, where we knocked two small rooms into one big room, I had a forced air duct left over, and I made a "Y" out of this, playing one jet on the basement water pipes, and the other into the crawl space under the kitchen floor where there are more pipes.

The result is that the forced air furnace is now a kind of fail-safe back-up to keep the pipes from freezing. So I can't close off those remaining three floor vents.

Not without putting some other source of heat in both places. Or insulating the whole thing with Core-Bond or similar. I'm not sure I want to do either because we use the basement as a root cellar.

I'll figure something out. The furnace will die of old age, probably, and I'll tear the stupid ducts out and put in some other kind of furnace system. The insurance company will require us to have a furnace, so I can't just not have one. Probably I'll run Pex hot water tubing under the floorboards and above the R 19, from a second, smaller propane tank, and so have underfloor heat. That will make Aimee, who likes to go barefoot, very happy.

In the meantime, I'm pleased with the results of my labors. I was able to shut down the big wood furnace three hours earlier than normal, while we watched the game in perfect comfort with the whole house heated to 72 F by the 20,000 BTU kitchen wood stove and a small electrical heater. And the oil furnace didn't kick in at 4 am like it normally does when it's cold out. The outside temp was 10 F, which is a bit warmer than it has been, but still pretty cold.

It just goes to show, you can never get too detailed about building envelope and penetration. Every gap counts.

More snow and very cold

It's cold. The high today may have been as much as 10 F here on the farm. The low last night was -7 F.

That's too cold for hens, dogs, and babies, so the hens have a heat lamp, the dogs only go out for short spells, and the baby doesn't go out at all except to a car that is already warmed up thoroughly.

The sheep just get an extra bale of hay and are fine with that. They don't even come in the barn at night, although they have an entrance and can do just that. They don't seem to mind how cold it gets. They do come in the barn for snow sometimes, and always for rain.

The Rover, which is supposed to plow the snow, is giving starter trouble. Part of the problem is the newly rebuilt and "tight" engine, which is hard to turn over when cold even with a good starter motor. I'm looking into getting a new one, but the replacements for the old Lucas "Prince of Darkness" motors are expensive, probably around $300.

Given that it will warm up to 40 F on Tuesday, and give rain, I'm not too worried. No new big snowstorms are forecast. Indeed, we haven't had a real nor'easter all winter, a typical El Nino year. Yesterday it snowed all day but only managed a few inches. I eventually got the Rover started and running today with a heat lamp, a magnetic block heater, and a jump from the Nissan, and plowed this small snowfall in a few minutes.

Inside all possible sources of heat are on, electric baseboards, the oil furnace, and the wood stove. It's nice and cosy. I don't like burning oil, and indeed try to burn very little of it under most circumstances, but I like frozen pipes even less than I like burning oil. I'm letting the old bathroom sink run a little to protect against freezing, and keep checking the temperature in the new crawl space under the extension, but that is steady at around 44 F.

Postscript: The well pump did eventually freeze during this cold spell, because the bulb that is supposed to keep it warm popped. That night it was -17 F, according to Aimee's car's dashboard temperature read-out. The well pump thawed after a half hour of an electrical heater. I'm going to fit a second bulb holder in there.

Here's your "moment of Zen", little Edana trying to make a phone call.

The cold begins

It's probably about 11 or 12 degrees F outside right now, which is not that cold for around here, but cold enough that we can begin to get the idea. Winter is here. Friday night is supposed to be around zero F.

I already plowed snow once, too. Another sign.

The new extension, as yet unused and unheated, is acting as a bit of a heat sink, but not as bad as I thought it might. When we finally finish the unending finish work, and finally can afford to buy some furniture to go in it, then we'll probably also add a small electrical heater in the far corner, to take the chill off and even out the cold gradient.

I'd rather not do this, of course. Running an electrical heater much of the winter can be expensive. But the shape of the house is all wrong for that. If our house had properly designed, instead of being built in stages over 114 years, we'd have made it as square as possible and put an efficient wood stove right smack in the middle of the square. But back when it was first built, it appears the main house was built first and the kitchen added as an extension. Part of the intent with the original kitchen design was probably to provide a place to cook in summer that was cooler than the rest of the house. It's essentially a separate wing. Now we've added another separate wing. The wood stove is not really in a central position, and so you either heat the kitchen to 85 degrees to get the corners up to a comfortable 68, or you add a little boost. We use little electrical baseboard-type heaters to take the chill off in the corners, and I don't have one yet for the extension. I need to pick one up, which means a run to town, something I won't have time for until school gets out Friday.

The sheep are feeling the cold a little too, but what they want isn't heat but more food. They've been going through two bales a day on the coldest days, which is too much, plus about half a scoop of oats mixed with a little sweet feed each. New hay comes Thursday, organized through the Unity College Woodsman club because we're too busy to get it and because the truck is on the fritz still. The sheep will be more economical to feed once we get them out of their mating season and back into the barn. They'll eat a little less, and waste less hay because feeding will be centralized.

I'm pretty toasty right now, though, with a cup of hot coffee, and the oil heater running. The woodstove had died down overnight, and I knew I needed to run the furnace a little to test it out -- it get used very little -- so this was a good opportunity. And it might be a good day for oatmeal. Or maybe pancakes. High carbs. That's what we need.

Winter hasn't changed much for country folk over the centuries. The antidote to cold is still to burn things, inside and out.

Cold Comfort Farm

Here's the interesting sight that greeted me this morning: The local plow truck had been around last night, for which we are grateful, but had plowed a nice "roadway" across our lawn, instead of on the actual road, and had left a five foot deep pile of snow between the roadway and the mailbox to boot.

I'm not complaining, though.

I'm grateful the town plow is willing to try to navigate our driveway at all.

We live on the edge of what was once a school bus turnaround. We own the turnaround, so we shouldn't ordinarily expect it to be plowed by the town's plow at all, but it's very difficult, especially after a heavy snow, for the plow truck driver to do a three-point turn on the part of the road that actually belongs to the town, and a lot easier for him to just keep driving around the turnaround, our driveway.

So every winter, most of the time, our driveway is plowed for free. Win-win, though -- the town plow truck therefore must take less time to do the part of the road that belongs to the town, which makes the overall job of plowing marginally cheaper for everyone else in the town, since the driver is paid by the hour.

But every once in a while some problem occurs. Last year I awoke one day to find a plow truck stuck in the middle of our lawn, and had to help dig it out with our tractor before the driver could get on his way.

Yesterday's deep snow lay unplowed all day until quite late in the evening. Then, while watching telly, I heard and saw the lights of the plow truck by our mailbox.

I wondered what had happened, but as the lights and noise went away, shrugged my shoulders and went back to the TV.

This morning it was pretty clear: The driver had tried to plow our lawn again, instead of the road, and as a result had gotten jimmied up in front of the mail box and had to back up and try again to make the turn.

So I had to get busy with the Kubota and plow away and put the road where it was supposed to be, fifteen feet further to the east, as well as move that big pile of snow in front of the mailbox. Here's a shot of the Kubota with its nose buried in the snow. Such a powerful little tractor. They don't make them like that anymore.

This all took a little while, and as a result my bum was pretty cold by the time I got done. This Kubota has the old type painted metal seat. They don't make them like that anymore, either, and for good reason.

I wear insulated coveralls for this job, but today they were not quite up to it.

I also found my left hand was getting pretty numb with the insulated work gloves. I have an old frostbite injury to my left pinky, which feels the cold pretty badly.

So I went inside for my Dachstein mitts. I have two pairs of these old fashioned oiled wool mountaineering mittens left over from my RAF Mountain Rescue days. My hand recovered it's feeling right away.

What I really need is a Dachstein mitt for the bum.

Mary-dog was quite dismayed to see the snow. She knew she had to empty her bladder this morning, but couldn't find anywhere to do it that wasn't up to her nose in snow.

Poor cold puppy.

After about two seconds of this, she was asking to be let back in the house.

What a wuss she is. Southern dog.

Forecast is -7 F tonight (-22 C), and -14 tomorrow night (-25 C). But it's always a few degrees colder here at 527 feet above sea level than the forecast says it will be.

Luckily, when it's that cold, it usually doesn't snow around here.

Otherwise I'd have to plow snow again and my bum would be really cold then.

Just how cold does it get in Maine?

Well, today was mild, historically speaking. The outside temp probably got up to 10 F. Last night it might have been -5, enough for me to check my pipes when I woke. But the winds of about 15mph sustained, gusts to 20, made it feel like about -18 F all day.

A thin wind, we say in Yorkshire, because it can go right through you.

How cold is -5 F? That would be -21 C. While minus 20 F is -28 C.

The sheep didn't go outside much. They, whoever they "they" are, say sheep can do without shelter in Maine, but I don't believe it. Whenever I did go out, to feed and water the beasts, walk dogz or bring in firewood, it took just a few moments for gobs of frozen breath to form on my beard.

But the wood stoves are drawing very well indeed.

In Britain, if I ever experienced this frosty face thing, it would be at the top of Cairngorm or the Ben. We get weather here at 500 feet that only occurs at 4,000 feet back home in the yUKe. I can well remember the coldest temperature I ever experienced at an inhabited altitude in Britain, during an arctic blast experienced while camped in a byre close to Braemar with the RAF Mountain Rescue. It was -33 C, and set a record for the town, getting on BBC Scotland, which is why I remember it.

We get that kind of cold almost every year in Maine.

A real cold night around here, which we usually get once or twice a winter, would be -20 or -25 F, or -28 to -31 C. Those kinds of nights we use the oil hot air furnace to keep the pipes from freezing. I have hot air outlets set up to blast air wherever there are pipes.

That's the only use, really, we put that furnace to, except for when we get house-sitters inexperienced with wood stoves.

When it's this cold, though, those woodstoves will go through a cord of wood in a week. It's a good job it usually doesn't stay this cold for very long. We'd go through a lot of trees.

Aimee's cold heart?

There were a few serious jobs to do around the house and farm this Saturday, mostly the generator unpacking and wiring, but also sheep water-changing and one or two other must-do farm things. Sunday, however, was pretty much of a wash because of the storm and so I concentrated on writing for my blogs, particularly my teaching blog. We're discussing agriculture in class right now, and some otherwise disinclined students are engaged, and I wanted to capitalize on that interest with an article and some videos.

I wrote until 9.30 am, which when you consider how early I get up, is a good long stint. The storm had blown up Saturday night but the winds for some reason had become disassociated with the worst of the snow, and so although we had a few inches of snow overnight, it wasn't too bad. I then took the dogs for a good walk, using the trail some local snowmobilers had kindly made to avoid the need for too much post-holing.

But by noon Sunday the winds had begun to strengthen, and by evening they were howling pretty good around here, the windows creaking, and the house occasionally too. It's somewhat unsettling to live with the notion that your house may one day blow away, but I guess since we've been messing with the planet's climate, we'd better get used to it.

The power flickered off only once, so my new generator went unused, but I felt vindicated in true husbandly fashion -- the way a man does when the wife doesn't listen too well to an argument you know is sound. The only problem would have been that the new power cord for the genny wasn't ready for service. I made plans for another trip to Home Depot during my lunch hour today. It helped the urgency a little that we also have a plumbing leak under the kitchen sink, for which I need parts.

During the afternoon, I turned my attention to learning to use a new piece of science kit the college has just bought, a FLIR infra red camera. I'll be using this in physics labs and in fact already have. It's a very helpful device, and very engaging. It will also find use in building technology and energy classes, as well as in community energy auditing service work with students.

The windy cold day made our creaky old farmhouse an ideal test bed. Although there has been an enormous amount of energy-saving work done over the years, and the house is currently pretty cosy and efficient, there is still more to do.

Here's the good news, the outside of the front of the house where our super-insulation retrofit shows very little energy leakage at all. The hot spots, at around 30 degrees F compared to an ambient of about 10 F when this shot was taken, are the windows and the satellite dish.

Here's some bad news, our rickety staircase from inside. You can see the cold air infiltration through the cracks in the staircase construction. That air is not too cold, indeed at 59 F it could be worse. It's coming from the cellar, and being slowed and warmed by the insulation in the cellar head.

I now have dozens of these kinds of pictures.

Here's a fun experiment, a Shenzi-cat in infra-red. You can even see the brindles on her fur, which Aimee was quite impressed by. I enjoyed the cold wet nose.

And here, for fair measure, is Charlie-cat, also with wet nose.

A student once ribbed Aimee for being "heartless" on an exam. She kept the note on her Facebook page. When the IR camera appeared she decided to prove the matter once and for all, with the help of a pack of frozen vegetables. Here is the officially cold-hearted Aimee:

I think she looks more like a ghost myself, and the veggie pack is the wrong shape and perhaps too far over to the left.

But I think we get her point.

The wind is still howling outside. I'll need to get suited up in my insulated coveralls and go break out our vehicles from whatever snow drifts they're in. This may be a day to try to get home early so I can move snow from the driveway and chore-paths.

Hopefully the wind will have dropped by then. It will be March soon, and we may begin to get some better weather around here. The likelihood of heavy snowfall drops in March, to be slowly replaced by rain, and mud season is usually underway by the end of the month.

Then April, and lambs in the sunshine.

I'm looking forward to it after these arctic months.

Stayin' warm?

(This post mirrored from the Sustainability Blog)

It's the depths of a Maine winter, and despite continued climate change and what was initially expected to be an El Niño year, we're having proper Maine winter weather. The warming trend expected in the southern Pacific in the early fall never quite panned out and SST temperatures there are right about average now.

As a partial result, we've had a solid week of cold Canadian air. It's warmed up quite a bit out there just now, a brief slug of warmer air having penetrated north as a Rossby wave passes, and the outside temperature is just below freezing. But the Canadian or more correctly polar air will return today and we'll be back in the teens and below for another week.

Minus ten to plus ten degrees F is, to say the least, pretty cold for an Englishman, even a fat one. But I long ago learned to deal with it, and even thrive.

How do we stay warm and well in such cold weather without contributing greatly to climate emissions?

Two important factors: Dogs and logs.

The science of logs is very interesting to me, especially this time of year when we depend on it a good deal. The Womerlippis heat primarily with wood, much of which we cut off our own land. This year we began the winter with about three cords on hand, most of which was ash and bird cherry, cut from the southerly end of our smallholding, that had been seasoned for two years. About a cord of ash was only one-year old, the remains of a single large ash tree tree that overlooked this year's garden expansion and had to go.

This would have been enough firewood, had we had a La Niña winter more like last year's. But the cold weather meant we burned more than we planned, and so I shopped around for an extra cord of dry firewood. A young lad in the town came by on New Year's Eve with a truck and a buddy and dropped a cord of mixed hardwood right into my firewood crib. (The very prompt delivery was, I surmised, due to a need for cash for some New year's carousing.) This was wood that had been cut and stored in tree length for two years, and so it is seasoned, but not nearly as bone dry as the Womerlippi logs that were cut and split and covered for one to two years.

Accordingly, some judicial mixing and matching of logs is called for. The off-farm logs can be burned whenever the house is too warm, or when the outside temperatures are moderate. The Womerlippi logs are saved for when the house needs to be warmed up, or when it's very cold outside. So far the coldest it's been at the farm was -5 F. It can get a lot colder than that around here. When it does, we have a back-up, a forced air oil furnace that can be fired up at the touch of a tiny button. This furnace, at 175,000 BTU/hr, dates back to the original pre-retrofit farmhouse, and is about double the capacity required for the house at its current level of air-sealing and insulation, so it heats everything up very quickly indeed. But we try not to use it, preferring to live on BTUs that are part of the contemporary carbon cycle, not the Cretacean one. 

This is a life trick that a lot of people are going to need to learn, one way or another, if we're to avoid a climate that is more like that of the Cretaceous. You don't need a wood stove. You could build a passive house like Unity College's own Terra Haus, or the Unity House. Or you could use a pellet boiler like the ones in our college library or Thomashow labs. Even a moderate retrofit of a regular oil-burning home can reduce your oil consumption enough to help meet emissions reduction targets.

But the wood stove is my favorite approach because of the nice radiant quality of the heat.

It helps in this emissions reduction project that our particular wood stove is a well-designed Norski model with the modern afterburner or secondary combustion set-up. Not only does the presence of a secondary combustion chamber reduce particulate and other emissions, it also saves firewood. The detailed retrofit work that we've invested in year after year also pays off. The house is literally cocooned in insulation. We haven't used more than a few gallons of heat oil a year for many years. Our last delivery was three years ago, and then only a hundred gallons. 

We do use the oil furnace when we leave the house and animals in the hands of a sitter, and most recently managed to fry an igniter during a power outage, requiring a diagnosis-and-repair process. Following that, I ran the unit for a few days, partly because I wanted to make sure it was working safely again, partly because we were having a cold snap and Aimee wanted me to do so. But I could only put up with the noisy thing for a few days and was glad of the excuse to turn it off yesterday when the temperatures warmed up a bit.

So, we're back to the logs. We used less than fifty gallons of oil this winter. I don't intend to use any more if I can help it.

As for the dogs, well, it's our winter break, and they get a lot of attention. In particular, they get nice long walks in the snow in the deep empty woods behind our house. There's about two thousand acres of empty Maine woodlands and wetlands back there, and in the winter, when the wetlands are frozen, it's all very much more accessible than in the summer when the bugs deter. I enjoy these walks, and appreciate the recovery of fitness and a regular sleep pattern that accompanies the exercise. If I didn't have as much work to do as I do, I'd take a good long walk with my dogs every day.

Here's some pictures that Aimee took that capture the mood of these winter hikes with the dogs.

Flame, a rescued Australian shepherd from Louisiana, has taken to the snow like a duck to water.

Ernie, an English Shepherd, and the official Womerlippi farm sheepdog, is her constant companion.

Sometimes we need to use snowshoes. 

Here's what happened to my second-best set of snowshoes just the other day! But because the snow was set up well, I was able to finish the hike easily with the fragment of snow shoe that remained attached. 

And yes, duct-tape does make a good repair material for snowshoes. If you're cheap, like I am.

So that, dear readers, is how we stay warm in the depths of a Maine winter, without adding too much to climate emissions, or to consumerism.

Slow daze for Haggis and I

It's been a slow week, helped along by a bout with a cold, ongoing, a holiday on Monday, and a snow day on Wednesday. I've been trying to get those lingering vehicle projects finished -- Aimee's truck now has a state safety inspection sticker, the refurbished rear brakes and emergency brake having done the trick -- it passed first time. The Escort wagon, which is in the best shape by far, failed inspection the first time, and is waiting to return to the inspectors, having received the required new tie rod end. The old one refused to part company with the car, which required me to go buy a new tool -- not usually something to upset me, but this time the unexpected expense did tick me off a bit. The old tie rod end had a severely rusted nut, which required a new angle grinder, my 15-year old one having died a couple years ago, and not having yet been replaced.

So I trekked into town and got a new grinder, as well as a half a ton of oats for the sheep, and four bags of sweet feed. Then, having first shoveled the oats into the grain crib, not a fun job if you have a cold because oats can be dusty, I ground off the rusty nut, hammered out the old tie rod end, and fitted the new one. Twenty minutes with the proper tool. It had taken me thirty minutes of messing about earlier to completely round off that rusty nut. Messing about being the nice way of saying it. My supervising NCOs from the RAF would have used a different word, beginning with "f."

Despite my incompetent blundering early on, and the new tool, I expect we still saved money on the job. Fifteen bucks for the part and forty for the new tool probably compares well to the hundred or hundred-fifty we would have been charged by a shop to replace the tie rod end.

By the time all this was done I was feeling pretty knackered. My nose had itched and run and sneezed constantly the entire time I was working, despite the antihistamine tablet I had taken. Not even bothering to put my tools away, I ate a quick cheese sandwich for lunch and headed to the couch to sleep it all off, sneezing a bit as I went.

What a way to spend a Saturday.

So the lingering cold goes away only slowly, as do the lingering car jobs. Wifie of course has no sympathy for me. Colds are self-inflicted injuries, as far as husbands are concerned, and if you give an inch, they take a mile, so there'll be no whinging about here! Haggis the dog, recently returned from the vets where he was diagnosed with Lyme Disease, a nasty little fact o' life here in Maine, received far more solicitous care.

Oh well. Only another two weeks until the Rugby internationals. Saturdays around here will pick up then, as long as this bl**dy cold goes away. And Lyme Disease is objectively worse than any cold.

Poor dog. But he's already looking much better, and the swelling he developed in his paw has gone down. On Thursday he could hardly walk, and he actually fell out of the car in the vet's parking lot. Normally we protect the dogs and cats against this disease with applications of long-lasting insect repellent every spring and summer, into the late fall, but we pulled some ticks off of Haggis as late as Christmas time this year. They must have been the ones to carry the disease.

Where he could find a live tick to pick up when there was already snow on the ground and there had been a month of hard frost already is a mystery of the first order. But he did. And it made him sick.

Cold lamb

Today's "Lambing Live" drama was a hypothermic lamb. Poppy, a shearling ewe, didn't quite know what to do with her first baby, so she left it on the cold hard frosty ground for quite a while.

I'm not sure how long. It doesn't take long when the ground is iron-hard and twenty degrees.

Of course, we try to watch them like hawks this time of year. I'd been up on night checks at 9am, 2.30am, 4am, and then every forty minutes or so.

But once the sun was up, I was struggling with a big round bale and a balky tractor and trailer, trying to feed the rest of the sheep. I heard the little one before I saw it, and picked it right up, but it was already cold.

Poppy had her own problems. She was backing into a brush heap, totally terrified of what was happening to her body.

To begin, I just bought Poppy and the lamb in and put them in a lambing pen with a heat lamp.

But Poppy didn't so much as lick the newborn even once.

Holding Poppy down, I squirted a little milk in his mouth, direct from the teat, but that didn't bring him round either.

After about another half hour of this, I bought the little one in, popped it in a blue WalMart tub in the kitchen with a heat lamp. Normally they go under the wood stove, but the stove was out.

Yet another use for those blue WalMart tubs. We must have twenty of the things around here.

Then I sterilized the intubation kit, just in case. But I didn't need it.

After a while the lamb was trying to stand in the tub, but his mouth was still cold when I stuck my finger in. Still, he did suckle. When they really go down they can't even do that. So back in the pen with mom he went. He tried gamefully to find the nipple but he was still too weak, and mom was more concerned about her second newborn so she didn't help much. She kept putting her leg in his way, and he'd fall over and have to try again.

So then we laid Poppy out once more, and put the lamb on the nipple. After a little initial confusion, with Poppy pinned firmly under my left knee (complaining loudly at this treatment) so she had no choice in the matter, I got him a good feed.

And then back under the heat lamp. If he follows the usual pattern, he'll sleep off that first feed and then when he gets up the next time he should be strong enough to find the nipple on his own.

And when I last saw them Poppy was giving the cold one a good licking.

And yes, the BBC does actually have a reality TV show called "Lambing Live." It's my new favorite show. Right up there with "University Challenge."

But Aimee prefers "Survivor."

I'm not giving you a link to Survivor.

You can find it yourself.

Twelve Below

Brrrrr. Cold AGAIN. I am really looking forward to our trip to Scotland and Wales, if only to have someone else be responsible for home heating for a few days. I checked the weather in Ardgay, Sutherland, close to where we'll be, and in Cardiff. Ardgay is still in winter, Cardiff in the middle of spring.

Here, we're waiting for the jet stream to move north. The standing wave of the jet stream system in the upper atmosphere controls Maine's weather at this time of year; as the jet stream waves move across, we alternate cold and mild air masses that control our temperature. Cold and mild, cold and mild. As the days lengthen, the influence of the sun begins to beat out the influence of the air mass, and so it can be warm and nice, and and feel very good in the ever-brightening sunshine in the mid-afternoon, even on a very cold day like today is expected to be, but at night the warmth is long gone.

Racing days are another feature, each day and each week brings noticeably more daylight.

In Scotland, in the far north where we're going, the weather has warmed up already from January. I expect we'll see very many fewer snowbanks, if any at all. There will be a snow line on the mountains above which life remains arctic, and that snowline will descend to sea level from time to time. But at low altitude, it will be a weak kind of snow, not the all-pervasive kind we have here. I have a six-foot snowbank in my front yard where the Kubota has been at work, and a good foot in the fields and woods.

In the Welsh valleys where my family lives, it will be warm and sunny, and there will be lambs and daffodils.

Lambs. Bliss. We too will have lambs soon, when we return. Tilley and Tootsie and Jewel and Maggie are bred and will drop sometime after the 10th. Abraram, the patriarch, will get all bolshie again defending his many offspring. Randy old bugger that he is, he's a very prolific parent and grandparent.

Watch this space, and the Sustainability Blog, for both Highlands and lamb pictures.

Cold

The weather earlier this holiday week may have been warm enough that I could strip down our small tractor and weld part of the sub-frame on Sunday and get it all back together on Monday, but that situation changed with a vengeance yesterday, as an arctic front swept in.

This year's winter weather in Maine is controlled by a substantial La Nina episode in the Pacific, and it's interesting to follow the jet stream pattern that results. After several weeks of being on the safe, warm side of this atmospheric phenomenon, we've slipped to the other side, and the wicked witch of the north now has us firmly in her grasp. I tried to finish up a few small tasks on the tractor yesterday, but was quickly rewarded with frozen fingers, and had to abandon the last fiddliest job of fitting a split pin (AKA cotter pin in American) to the kingpin.

Instead I came indoors for a very welcome cup of hot coffee.

This morning it's zero degrees F out there, which is minus eighteen degrees C. That isn't too cold for Maine, but it is unpleasant to be outside, and has me worried about frozen pipes.

All proper Maine husbands need to worry about pipes.

In our case, the cellar and crawl spaces where all our pipes are located are heated by the exhaust vent from our propane hot water tank, and by the wood stove which radiates directly to the floor on the underside of which the pipes are attached. I used to heat both cellar and crawl space directly with a special vent tapped from the forced air oil furnace, but I disconnected this vent this fall when I sealed the furnace system and insulated all the ducts. The furnace went unused 95 percent of the time, and the leaky ducts, and especially that cellar vent, ensured that this system became the greatest source of cold air infiltration to the house. The wood stove would suck essentially suck cold combustion air up from the basement through the duct work, making the house feel drafty and uncomfortable. By discontinuing the cellar heating, and sealing and insulating the duct work, most of the remaining cold air infiltration was cut off, but I was worried that the pipes might not get enough heat.

It seems I shouldn't have worried.

The prime result is, we were able to quit using the large outside wood furnace. All we have heating this home right now, even while it's zero degrees F outside, is about 40,000 BTUs/hour of wood heat from an 80,000 BTU/hour Norwegian wood stove running at about half capacity, and a 1.5 KW oil-filled electric heater running at two thirds capacity. I doubt we'll use even three cords of wood this year, when we have about five on hand, and usually use about four.

That's only 43,000 BTUs/hour total, when the degree days needed are something like 100, and a massive victory for energy efficiency. In earlier posts, I was worried about the outside wood furnace, and how we would be able to afford to replace a faulty chimney, but it seems like I don't need to worry. We could even sell that furnace off.

Or, more likely, save it to use for heating the new workshop building we have planned.

Stayin' Warm?

Zero degrees again. the goose egg.

Stayin' warm? That's what Mainers ask each other this time of year, when they meet neighbors and friends at the post office, the hardware store, or the Brooks "general." The standard greeting.

If you are not "stayin' warm" then that's a very big problem. Something went wrong with your efforts to ensure heat for the winter. You don't have enough firewood. You can't afford oil or propane or kerosene. The furnace is "out" and you can't get a furnace guy to come look at it. To some extent, this is definitely your problem, not your neighbors. Particularly if you are a responsible adult, you're the one that must make the plans, get in the firewood, buy the heat oil, put in the insulation. This is rock-ribbed, formerly Republican New England, after all. But if you're old, or sick, or just pathetic, and not "stayin' warm," someone will like as not take pity on you, and deliver a truckload of free wood scraps, or put plastic on your leaky windows, or loan you their back-up heaters and fuel. They'll do their best to shrug off the good deed. Charity is demeaning, we understand up here, even when it absolutely genuine and comes from the heart.

So no-one will make a big deal of any such good deed. Charity is not something you wear on your sleeve, like the millionaire who gives money to the church and is celebrated loudly. That was all over Georgia when I lived down there. Up here, charity is an underground phenomenon. But surprisingly widespread, especially among older men, the most competent and silver-backed (and modest) of whom often have three or four shut-ins they very secretly keep an eye on. Even their wives may not know that for years they've been helping some old lady out. When it gets cold.

Mainers also like to have "back-up for back-up" when it comes to heat. We like wood stoves because they keep going in power cuts, which always come with ice and wind storms. Power cuts are a norm, not an exception. We like to have back up generators and inverters, to run furnaces and well pumps and light bulbs. A big old oil or coal furnace, even if you don't use it much because you heat with wood, is never a bad thing to have. It's even worth having three or four of those 110 volt electric radiators, because having one for each room you actually use will keep you from the utter misery of not "stayin' warm." We also have elaborate back-up systems of heat tape and strategically placed light bulbs to keep pumps, well, and pipes from freezing if furnaces quit.

If all else fails, one of those stand-alone kerosene heaters, where the fumes go right into the house, will be a life-saver. All your liberal ideas about health and air pollution will go out the window. You'll happily breathe those foul fumes, pull your chair right up to the heat, suck it down, just to stay warm.

If, for some reason, you are defeated in this fight, and the quiet charity of your neighbors fails you, the cold will creep into your house like an icy blight. The walls will feel cold to the touch, the floor will hurt your feet, there won't be any place to get comfy. Reading a book, watching TV, eating dinner, sleeping, all these normal activities will become hard to do because you can't concentrate enough to do them, not even sleep, because the cold will nag you. You'll feel miserable. Your hands, feet, and nose will become numb. You'll find you have to keep moving. If you're old, you won't be able to, and your body core will cool down and you might die. If no-one comes to see you. But someone will.

If you leave, and go somewhere warm, like church, or the cinema, or work, you'll suddenly feel safe, and then happy, a little giddy with comfort, and then you'll begin to fall asleep.

Or, especially if you're younger, you'll become a little frantic, like a worried beaver or squirrel, and you'll run errands to the hardware store, perusing the heating appliances, counting your pennies, trying to find something that will make you warm again that you can afford. You'll troll through "Uncle Henry's" trying to find dry firewood. If you know your forest trees, your dendrology, and have land, you'll take your chainsaw, or even a bucksaw, and you'll cut down ash, and burn that, the only life-saving tree that will burn when green.

And our students say dendrology is silly, not useful. They've never been cold.

Don't worry about us. We're keepin' warm.