All the chores get harder right before we bring the animals back to the barn for the winter. Thankfully, these last few days it's been a breeze just walking across the barnyard with a few buckets of water. The cows are in the pasture behind the lower barn and the sheep are cozy in their straw inside.
Before all this happened, however, there were days of frozen buckets, frozen faucets, frozen valves and frozen water troughs. We spent a frustrating week driving the monster truck (an enormous, red behemoth with two 50 gallon tanks on the back) out to the cows. The trick was to leave the tanks empty and the valve open at night so that it didn't freeze shut. One night, however, we discovered that our vigilance just wasn't enough. Caught between needing to get to an engine mechanic class and the approaching darkness, there was only one answer to the frozen pipes. The blow torch.
We spent a chilly few minutes while Theo heated everything up until it worked. This was after the chilly thirty minutes spent looking for the blow torch in the first place.
But, the cows got water, we got dinner before our class, and the blow torch got a new permanent home where we always know where it is. Success!
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