Zero and Grumpy: Status Update, with Phenology

For the third time this winter I shoved my feet into frozen boots on a porch below a thermometer reading zero degrees Fahrenheit...and that thermometer hangs right beside the door and gets a degree or two of boost when the door's opened, too.

The road to work was almost traffic-free. Why was I not surprised? Like a lot of people, I woke up at six o'clock this morning and thought about going to work. What I thought was "If I leave at 7:00, I'll arrive at or before 8:00 and get in maximum online time...If I leave at 8:30, if X believes X can get anything done at work today, I can catch a ride in X's overheated truck." X is not a close friend, not close enough that either X or I would want to waste a phone minute to schedule car-pool time for a three-mile trip, but X always stops, in cold weather, just to release some of the excess heat from the truck. So of course I left at 8:30, and of course X did not expect to be able to get anything done before the sun was shining, and at 9:15, while wrestling with the frozen door to the warehouse where I'd left the computer, I saw X's truck pass by.

I did not see birds, except for one crow, sitting in the sun with all its feathers fluffed up, trying to look like a raven. (Ravens are active in this kind of weather; once in a while, when we're having a record freeze, a raven strays into my part of the world...but not in every person's lifetime. What I saw was definitely just a shivering-cold American Crow.)

I saw the tracks only of one of the little stray hound dogs, the whole pack of whom scared my cats on the morning of Christmas Eve. There were six dogs, all small and young, with beagle-sized bodies and legs in all lengths from basset to six-month-old hunting puppy; now there's only one, the longest-legged one, the hunting hound's puppy. I saw some tracks yesterday afternoon and some fresh tracks this morning. I am thinking of ways to trap that dog. The working trap I have, built to trap raccoons and groundhogs, is not high enough to hold it comfortably, but if the dog is still making tracks this afternoon, it probably won't care how cramped it is...especially if I can arrange to uncage it at the Dog Sanctuary.

Even Samantha didn't leave tracks in the snow this morning, although Schatzi did, at the trailer park.

Some men who are "absentee landlords" at places where they keep animals had not left tracks leading to where they leave either the animals or their trucks. Maybe during the last deep freeze they set up mechanical food dispensers for their animals. Maybe not. I will say, though, that if Y had done the decent thing and paid me to do it, Y's cattle would be sure of having food and water. The snow has not been deep enough to interfere with my getting to that barn, although it's obviously daunted Y...

Earlier in January, a boulder that has been precariously balanced above the private road, braced by a small inadequate tree, fell down into the road. Some neighbors have talked about using chains to move the rock with a truck. It's only about 1x1x3' of solid limestone. Is that enough to break chains as the rock scrapes over the stony road? Meh. I personally like having no motor traffic pass the Cat Sanctuary. I'm sure a bulldozer will be deployed soon. Y con suerte Y's cattle will be hardy types who've gone out as a herd and used their breath to defrost enough dry grass and water to survive.

I took a little extra time to walk past the Dog Sanctuary. The animals were all basking on the sunny porch on the south side of the house. This is not necessarily all bad. They have a cellar where the air temperature probably stayed above freezing, and they were stretching and rolling and enjoying the sunshine. The humans, however, had not apparently ventured out yet. I knocked on the door, rang the phone. No answer.

Meanwhile the cutest and friendliest of the cats currently in residence at the Dog Sanctuary let me pick her up and snuggle her on my warm sleeve under my warm(ish) shawl. She's not as ordinary a little tabby as she might look. She's another social cat who was born feral and successfully trained a human to feed and pet her. She's also small for her age because she had a hard time with a respiratory infection, and as she cuddled up to me I could hear and smell that she's having a relapse, probably because, as Samantha would be delighted to tell this cat's human, a half-grown kitten's fluff is not dense enough to keep a spring kitten warm in this kind of Deep Freeze weather. Twenty degrees Fahrenheit (negative single digits Celsius), no problem, but when temperatures drop into single digits Fahrenheit, a spring kitten needs to be indoors. Little Miss Pretty Fur was breathing out the odor of a cat who's going to be dang lucky to survive even with another boring round of pricey antibiotics.

So then I walked on to the warehouse to get the laptop out of storage. The doorknob was iced over. Some person wearing men's size 8 boots with new, heavy tread and built-up heels had walked down the street with a bottle marked "spring water" and had very deliberately poured water onto the doorknob. The water had started to freeze while this nasty person was still playing the nasty prank; the person had abandoned the mostly full bottle, with the cap lying beside where the ice was sticking out at the top, on the street.

Gate City has one genuine Homeless Person that I know about for sure. He had been sleeping on someone's couch while that person was alive; then he spent the summer camping in the garbage disposal area in the trailer park, and then in winter he apparently talked some other people into letting him enclose part of their porch with tarps. He is a pathetic example of how the Welfare State fails to care for those who do need some sort of help. The Welfare State supplies him with food stamps, which he uses to buy food he can barter for booze and pills, and with easy access to a food pantry, where he actually gets his meals. He seems to be dangerous only to himself. People have tried to help him, but self-destruction seems to be his goal, so everyone but the Welfare State has admitted that anything short of forced detoxification is only enabling him to stay drunk.

I'm pretty sure he would not have poured water into a doorknob to vent his frustration about being unable to sleep off a binge in a warehouse. For one thing he's cozier snuggling up with the homeowner's pets behind the tarps at the house near the store where he buys beer, and for another thing it's hard to imagine him walking more than a mile away from that site in size 8 boots; I'd guess he wears size 10. I'm also pretty sure that a local social worker's wonderful do-goody idea of setting up a methadone clinic (to attract funding from the state, and theoretically encourage Tennessee drug addicts to buy gas and food here) has attracted other Homeless Person types who are probably nastier than our local, homegrown specimen.

So it took me about fifteen minutes to pick the ice out of the lock with the key, then about ten minutes to break the ice that had formed around the door and door jamb, and between that and the diversion to the Dog Sanctuary I reached the cafe and turned on the computer just a little before 10:30. I spent about two hours outside in zero-degree air, and even with the heavy fairisle-stitch over-dress between my actual clothes and the big blanket shawl, I felt chilly. And grumpy.

To all who feed and/or shelter any kind of dumb animals, whether cats, dogs, cows, horses, chickens, sparrows, pigeons, straying winter "snowbirds," or creatures that started out to be human and then destroyed the human parts of their brains with booze and drugs: WHEN TEMPERATURES GO BELOW ZERO DEGREES FAHRENHEIT, YOU NEED TO MAKE SPECIAL PROVISIONS FOR THESE PETS OF YOURS. Only creatures that instinctively dig deep burrows in the ground are naturally equipped to survive outdoors in this kind of weather. If you can't build an insulated shelter with some sort of heat for them, and don't have a deep cellar with an earth floor, you need to set up some kind of box or barricade and bring them into the basement. They'd probably be miserable in the warm room where you are indulging your natural instinct to call in sick and stay under a pile of blankets till midday, but they are miserable in deep-freezer-box air, too. Probably even more miserable, spending the whole miserable night in what might be as "warm" as 35 degrees Fahrenheit in a basement or on an enclosed porch, than you imagine yourself to be when you force yourself to sit up in, ohhh shivers, maybe 55 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the house.

Yes, I know, when you've set your thermostat to 75 and your heat pump is doing its very best just to keep your whole house heated to 55 degrees, it does feel chilly and discouraging. Well, when you've adapted to being able to keep yourself warm at the kind of temperatures Virginia normally gets, outside, in winter--at which furry animals or heavily clothed humans can survive, if active and healthy--and you suddenly have to spend a night at the kind of temperatures the livable part of Canada normally gets, that's even chillier and more discouraging.

Grump, grump, grump! Nag, nag, nag! Neither raising beef cattle nor trying a mostly unsuccessful strategy to wean Tennessee dopeheads off opiates was my idea, and if the people whose ideas those things were had asked me I would have told them not to do those things in the first place--but if you're going to do them, y'might at least do them right!

Then when I checked out the actual e-mail...that should probably be a separate rant. Here, in any case, is an Amazon book link. I've not read this Kindle e-book and am not impressed by the way the cover is set up, but it make a point...that cat and dog enjoy running around in the snow, just as a human who'd put on a heavy coat and boots and gloves would, for an hour or two; after that they need to get in out of the snow.