5 a.m. Friday morning: I wake up shivering. Why is it so cold in my house? Thermostat is on. Power’s on. Heater’s making noise. What’s up?
Oh no. I try to start the stove—no dice. I run outside to check and confirm my fears. I am completely and totally out of propane.
It is now 6 a.m. and T-minus four hours until the snow is scheduled to start.
I call the emergency hotline and wait on hold forever. Finally, I get a person who informs me that my local branch does not take emergency calls. How is that possible? I’ll have to call them when they open at 8.
8 a.m. Call. Busy.
8:01 a.m. Call. Busy.
8:02 a.m. You guessed it. Repeat every minute until…
8:15 a.m. Call. An answer! They’ll do their best. Maybe not an answer after all.
8:25 a.m. A call back. Because I’m not on their regular delivery schedule, I’m at the end of the list. No guarantees. Why am I not on their regular delivery schedule, by the way? Because when I changed the account name from “Sprieser Sporthorse” to “Lauren Sprieser,” that went out the window. Awesome.
Chaos ensues for the next half hour, with angry phone calls, begging, bribery and a few rather inappropriate four-letter words.
9 a.m. Huh. Turns out the weatherman was off by an hour—the first flakes are starting to fall.
11 a.m. Fortunately the snow’s off to a slow start, and the roads are staying clear; it was in the 40s yesterday and the day before, so the ground’s pretty warm. And saints be praised, because here comes the propane man. Hoorah! I could kiss him. Instead, I give him a muffin.
4 p.m. Got through all the horses, and now we have a game plan. Sprieser Sporthorse owns one plow, which fits on the front of our four-wheeler/dump vehicle gismo. It works a treat, but only up to so deep, which means that when the snow really gets going we’ll have to plow every 3-4 hours. My dad volunteers for midnight, and my mom wants 4 a.m., so lucky me! I get 8 p.m. Easy-peasy. My dad, who is recovering from knee surgery, helps me put the chains on the Kubota’s back tires. And then we wait.
6:30 p.m. It’s already starting to get ugly out there, probably 6 inches. I start plowing early.
8:30 p.m. WOW! Am I glad I got going when I did. I plowed for two straight hours, and will do another half hour after I do night check for the horses.
Midnight: I can hear Dad out plowing. Power’s still on. We’ll be fine, nothing to worry about. Back to sleep.
5:30 a.m. I wake up and look out my window. Dang, you can barely tell where the road is! I thought Mom was going to plow at 4. Maybe she overslept.
Oh, and the power’s out. Great. Generator’s going strong, which means we have enough lights in the barn to get us going and running water. No heat, though. Crap. Run extension cords and space heaters as necessary.
6 a.m. Saturday. Ring, ring. It’s my mom.
“Your dad drove the plow off the road. Can you get the truck?”
Feed horses, stomp out to the truck. There’s at least 18 inches on the ground, and it’s not due to stop until 10 p.m. tonight. I get the truck down my driveway, down the road and up my parents’ driveway, getting royally stuck and unstuck once, until I come upon the Kubota.
“Off the road” does not quite do it justice. It is dangling by one tire off a steep bank. It’s a miracle my dad isn’t frozen in the ditch below.
With zero traction, I not only fail to unstuck the Kubota, but I get the truck stuck too. I trudge back to the farm (and it’s really snowing now; I can barely see, and it’s windy as all get-out) to get the tractor, which slowly chug-a-lugs its way over. We get the truck out; in fear of getting it stuck again, I gun it to the relative safety of outside my parents’ garage, with one near-miss of a fallen tree branch. I take a chip out of the driver’s side window, but I make it.
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In the time it takes me to trudge back, my parents have valiantly, but unsuccessfully, tried to use the tractor to pull the Kubota loose. No go. I decide to take the tractor back and use the bucket to move manure—we normally put stall waste into the back of a teeny John Deere dump vehicle, but a roller skate does better in the snow than that thing—so we can get stalls done.
10 a.m. I load up the tractor bucket full of manure and go to dump it in our manure pile. There goes the poop…and the bucket. Great. There’s no way I can get it back on by myself, and my dad can’t come over; in all the screwing around this morning, he’s really banged up his bad knee. We agree to make a manure pile in the driveway, and tackle the problem again later.
Noon: Thank God for my working students. They are truly saints. They normally each get a weekend day off, but they’re both here, trudging it out. I’d be lost without them. The least I can do is feed them, so I make them lunch.
2 p.m. Power’s back on! We take advantage of the moment to put horses out in our exerciser, so at least they can get out of their stalls. Cleo and Midge don’t go in the exerciser, so I hop on them bareback, them in their winter blankets, me in my Carhartts. Midge, if you try and dump me one more time, there’ll be Hell to pay. Cleo is, of course, perfect.
4 p.m. The snow has stopped early! Still topping out at 30 inches, though. Yikes. I manage to bust open a few of our small dirt paddocks so I can let some of the horses out for half an hour.
5 p.m. Crap. Power’s out again.
6 p.m. Drive the tractor over to my parents’ house; they’re offering food, which I can’t complain about, plus maybe a vehicle can make it out tomorrow morning via the tractor’s tracks? Mostly I just don’t want to walk over again. There are snow drifts up to my waist.
8 p.m. Night check. Space heaters are keeping the barn garage, where all our pipes are located, at a reasonable temperature. I fill three big troughs full of water in the washrack and go to bed. There’s nothing more I can do but cross my fingers and hope nothing bursts in the night.
11:30 p.m. Woohoo! Power back on.
6 a.m. Sunday: Hay, grain, start putting horses in the exerciser and in the three paddocks we’ve managed to open. A normal Sunday, except for, you know, the 30 inches of snow outside.
8 a.m. Oh, come on. Power’s out again. At some point I notice the phones are out too. But good news—the roads are clear, and my dad’s got someone to come out and plow our driveway. Maybe they can also pull our plow out? Then we’d really be back up and running!
10 a.m. Stalls done. My dad comes over, and we get the tractor out to try and get the bucket back on. I walk down to the manure pit to try and figure out how to get the bucket out of there. Hmm.
Hmm.
Maybe I could? No. What about… no, that won’t work either. Hmm.
Sigh. There’s only one way—and that’s to climb in there.
10:15 a.m. Yuck.
10:16 a.m. No problem, I’ll just flip it over and roll it down.
10:17 a.m. Jeez, it’s heavy.
10:18 a.m. OK, flipped over! Now it’ll just roll down on its own.
10:19 a.m. C’mon. Get rollin’.
10:20 a.m. Crap.
10:40 a.m. Yeah, I’m going to need a shower after this, but the bucket is now out of the manure pile. Now to just reattach it to the tractor…
11 a.m. There has GOT to be an easier way to do this!
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11:15 a.m. FINALLY. Now we just have to get the tractor back up the hill and get to work!
11:20 a.m. C’mon.
11:25 a.m. Come ON.
11:30 a.m. Oh, for the love of Pete. The tractor is stuck too.
Noon: We quit. Horses are fed, generator’s still cooking. There’s nothing else we can do… let’s go riding!
My mom on her Tres, working student Nicole on her Spyder, and Midgey and I venture out into the snow. I LOVE snow work. It’s easy to get their heart rates up, and the snow ices their legs down as they work. Neat. We mostly walk, but Spyder and Midge are both begging to go for a run, so Nicole and I let ‘em rip once.
And it is AMAZING. Midge is normally pretty animated in the leg department, but he bounds through the snow like a deer, up and down. It’s like flying. I can’t stop giggling!
I decide to take Fender out for a quick ride, too. He’s getting better and fitter every day. Today I went for it, made some sitting trot, worked on transitions, even made him go sideways a little. Not his favorite thing just yet, but he makes an effort. He takes a great connection to the bridle for about a minute, and then his back poops out, and he crashes into my right hand, and I work with him, and he takes a big deep breath and carries himself again.
He does not, however, do anything naughty or really horrendous. He screws around a little in the bridle when I really put the pressure on, but it’s more “DANGIT, I’m TRYING!” than a middle finger. Good boy! He’s such a trouper that I take him for a lap around the barn through the snow. He slides around a little and maybe considers being a turd once, but I figure 1) he’s not really strong enough to cause too much trouble in the snow, and 2) if I come off, it’ll be a soft landing. He’s a model citizen.
3 p.m. A hot shower! Heaven on Earth.
4 p.m. Good timing, too, because there go the lights. AGAIN. And oh, by the way? The professional plow driver never showed. He’s hoping to come by tomorrow morning. Ugh.
6:30 p.m. Lights back on and just in time to catch the Superbowl!
6:31 p.m. OK, maybe not. The lights flicker for another hour before they finally stay on, but I’ve given up on the ‘bowl. The best news of all? With the power comes the Internet, so I can check email and catch up on the news.
Shockingly, most of my email comes from students cancelling lessons for next week and from riders who are supposed to ride with Scott Hassler here Tuesday. I didn’t think it could happen, but I was holding out hope. Turns out Scott is trapped in Florida anyway (aww, poor guy), so it’s no clinic for us. Crud, I could really have used the help.
10 p.m. The first night I sleep soundly, not worried about whether we’re going to freeze to death or not.
6 a.m. Monday. Mondays are my day off normally, but my girls worked through their days off; it’s only fair I chip in. I feed breakfast. Jeez, it’s COLD. Lights are still on, and the phones are back up, but no Internet and still no plow.
10 a.m. Success! My dad got the tractor up. No luck yet in getting the plow moved, but at least we can make some progress! I’m going more than a little stir crazy, so it’s off to do some shoveling. Maybe some preventative ibuprofen first…
1 p.m. THANK GOD for preventative ibuprofen! I’m going to hurt tomorrow anyway, I can tell, but at least I got a leg-up. With my dad in the tractor, I cleared a path from the garage (where the John Deere poopmobile lives) to the barn, then helped the girls load the poop from the driveway pile into the back of the poopmobile to drop it off in the manure pile, which is now relatively accessible. So that’s done.
Now it’s just waiting for my dad to finish working on the driveway. It’s slow going, with just the tractor and bucket, but I bribed him with lunch, so that’s got to count for something. Here’s hoping, because if I don’t get grain and diesel tonight we’ll be in a world of hurt: They’re calling for up to a foot more snow here Tuesday-Wednesday. How is that even possible?
4 p.m. My knight in orange armor! Three cheers for my Dad. With a little help from yours truly at the end, we busted through to the end of the driveway. QUICK! Into the car (a Honda Fit, FYI – two wheel drive!) and off to the feed and grocery stores for supplies (Ultium, Enrich 32, orange juice, frozen pizza). They’re now calling for up to 20 inches Tuesday-Wednesday. Hilarious.
The roads are terrifying, and I’m racing the sun—as soon as the temperature drops it’ll be ice central.
6:30 p.m. Dear neighbor down the street: it is absolutely NOT OK to get almost to the top of an icy, icy hill and come to a stop. Takes me 20 minutes to get out of trouble, but I get there. Schmuck.
I’m going to email this off to my COTH editor before the Internet goes out again, but stay tuned for the latest installment of snow-induced insanity. Anyone want to rent me a barn in Florida next winter? I’m pretty committed to that plan right now.
