I've got my finger's crossed that today is the day we can get out to town...

We've been snowed and iced in (mostly iced) since Saturday. We did make a quick trip to town on Sunday to get the Christmas tree and some odds and ends Joe needed to put the plumbing back together in the kitchen. Joe's SUV had no trouble making it, the roads were slippery but  he's very good at driving on ice... Unfortunately my car is NOT a car that gets around well (or even adequately!) in snow and ice, so we've been home since then.

It hasn't been too bad being home so much... We put the tree up and decorated the house on Sunday, and Monday and yesterday we got a lot of school done (a whole week's worth!) and I worked on my project with the logs in the kitchen..

We've also been out at the barn more than usual. When it's really cold I feed the animals an extra meal at midday to help them keep their temperature up, so we've been out there feeding and just taking care of the extra stuff that needs to be done when it's this cold.

 When I went out to feed yesterday evening, I found Tilly had terrible "snowballs" stuck to her hooves from walking around on the snow. The poor thing looked like she was walking around on high heels... her hooves were about 2" off the ground and she was walking on nothing but ice and snow that was packed into the center of her hoof. This is bad, of course, because the middle of her hoof isn't made to carry her weight... it's the soft part. I tried to clean the ice out with the hoof pick, but it was frozen solid and not moving. So I finished my other work, and went back to the house and thought for awhile, knowing Tilly was probably in pain and I needed to do something... but what?

I finally had an idea and went back out after the kids went to bed, armed with a big candle. After giving the animals more hay (it was 12 below by that point) I pulled Tilly into the barn and started working on her hooves... heating the hoof pick in the candle flame then picking at the ice, then heating the hoof pick... well,  you get the idea. Twenty minutes later my hands were aching with the cold and no longer moving properly, but Tilly was standing on her hooves, so I let her go and came back in the house.

Hopefully she'll be ok this morning. She looked so miserable last night... This has been a very long string of bitter cold temperatures for a little donkey that came from the dry heat of the Death Valley (the area  she ranged when she was living wild).

I too am so looking forward to it warming up... It can snow all it wants, I don't mind... but this bitter cold is hard. I'm ready for a little sun and thawing...