Winter Wonderland

I love all these snow and ice photos I took around our property.

Seems I didn't gather the eggs fast enough before they froze.

The pond froze and the ducks walked all over it. 

We were concerned that our ducks wouldn't survive because 2 years ago when we had a bad freeze, we had all of our ducks except one die freeze to death.  The one surviving duck we named Survivor.  Now we had 9 and we decided to try to capture them all and put them in a caged area with a heat lamp.  We spent close to an hour with Caleb trying to catch them.  There was a small section of the pond that was not frozen and they continued to fly into that area and swim.  We tried luring them with a rope to an area where we could snatch them.  We tried tossing a net over them.  We tried bringing food to them to lure them.  It was exhausting but over a 2 day period, we captured 8 out of the 9 and I do believe that those 8 were glad to be warm by a heat lamp.  Thankfully the lone, stubborn duck did survive the cold.

On Monday, I was scheduled for an Azure Standard delivery.  Since I'm the drop coordinator, I had told our truck driver (who is from OR and is not familiar with the southern mentality of winter storms) that we would NOT be able to deliver on Monday. He called me Monday morning and had been camped out in our Franklin drop location since Saturday and was hoping we could deliver that afternoon so he wouldn't be off his schedule too much.  It was a mess, but I contacted all 80 something customers and told them the drop delivery would go as planned that afternoon.  My Man drove me to the location and it was very dangerous getting there.  Below is a picture of what Pinewood looked like and we had to turn around at the end and take another route because it was blocked.  Trees were down everywhere blocking roads and causing detours.  About 25 customers were not able to pick up because they were without electricity, out of town to avoid the storm or blocked in by fallen trees.  We loaded up the Tacoma to the top with all of their items and brought them home.  For the next week, it took me many hours communicating pick up with these customers and sorting things out of the truck for pick ups from our package shed.  Once the weather got above freezing, we still had some items that had not been picked up that had to be stored in the barn fridge/freezer.  Needless to say, it was a mess - lots of work on my part - and I hope that never happens again!  My volunteer job was in need of a raise! 😬 

And August was occasionally brought in for a little warming up.

This is the net over our chicken pen area.