Close call at Falling Downs

Preem Doug was in the 'hood today, lending the prestige of his office to the Wiarton Willie Festival. That's a scam cooked up by a few locals as an excuse for a good piss-up in the middle of winter. Not that we really need excuses around here.

Willie's big day dawned for me at 6 a.m. when the sputtering and coughing and clanking of the water-pipes roused me out of a deep slumber... it took a moment to register what was going on, and suddenly I sat bolt upright... OH MY GOD THE PIPES ARE FROZE!!!

We've taken some pains to avoid such a situation after a close call last winter, but I didn't see any particular threat when I turned in last night. After all, the temp wasn't supposed to drop any lower than -15, and we'd had days of -20 before last year's scare. As a precaution we'd left a tap running, on the theory that running water can't freeze.

But there's no water coming out any taps anywhere. Getting a plumber in on the weekend is gonna cost double what it costs during the week, and that's pretty much an arm and a leg, and that's if you can even find one.

I hustled downstairs and fired up a kerosene heater by the water tank in the basement. Then I began my trouble-shooting.

Longish story short, after two trips into town to visit the hardware store, and a survey of relevant YouTube DIY vids, by one o'clock we had running water again!

Whew!

I don't understand why more kids aren't going into the trades. What I did in six or seven hours would have taken a professional an hour and a half, max, and they would have walked away with three or four hundred bucks, easy. That's if they were honest. They could easily have done a lot of unnecessary stuff and dinged me for a couple thousand, and I'd have been none the wiser. After all, you need your water!

But no, kids take bullshit degrees, run up tens of thousands in student loans, and then find themselves working in fast food. Go figure!

As for Doug and Willie, I assume the locals gave Doug a warm Bruce County welcome. He was up here with one of the local PC guys (that's "Progressive Conservative," not Politically Correct, by the way, although progressive conservative strikes me as somewhat of an oxymoron.) Up here we generally vote for somebody who can claim a bit of farm cred. You'll never get elected unless you've reached deep into a cow's hind end and pulled out a calf.

As for Willie, he claims we're due for an early spring. Like the politicians, Willie usually gets it wrong, but what the hell...


Willie Weekend is a damned good excuse for a party!

Apologies to the rodent

About six weeks ago I labelled Wiarton Willie a liar on account of his claim there'd be six more weeks of winter.

Seems I jumped the gun a little. Here's what things look like today, April 5th.



Those are Falling Downs meadows clear to the horizon, all under a foot of snow, on 5th April!

So Willie wasn't lying; he just forgot to mention that those six more weeks were coming in March and April.

Sorry dude! I certainly owe you an apology...

Mind you, that false spring ruffled some feathers amongst the sandhill cranes and the geese and the mourning doves, at least until they froze to death.

And the spandex crowd has been scarce on the ground too.

I think we'll all be paying you a little more attention next year, Willie.

This cruel, cruel winter

Six weeks ago, Canada's most famous lying rodent outside Ottawa, Wiarton Willie, predicted six more weeks of winter.

At the time that was something of a disappointment. We'd had enough already of a winter that set in early and froze deep. But we grudgingly braced ourselves for that six week trudge to the finish line.

Last Tuesday I believed we had made it. I took the hounds on an extended ramble all the way up the escarpment. The sky was the bluest of blue and a hopeful spring breeze blew. We made an afternoon of it and arrived home exhausted, the three of us, but content and sure that spring was, if not quite sprung, then just around the next corner.

That evening I noticed a faint tickle at the back of my throat, but thought nothing of it. In the middle of the night I woke up drenched in sweat, fevered and freezing and my throat on fire. That's been the last three days; a cycle of semi-lucid consciousness followed by a deep coma, from which I emerge every few hours just as I am at risk of drowning in my sheets.

And the dreams....  a non-stop purgatorial landscape, heaven above and hell below, with those horizons stretching out to infinity in all directions with no way out. Searching in vain for a ladder or a trap door, searching... until the next awakening into the fevered and freezing reality of soaking sheets and a really big load of laundry to be done before I have any dry ones.

While I was dreaming winter returned. The promise of Tuesday was just wishful thinking. Today there is a full-blown blizzard rattling the windows here at Falling Downs. The temperature will plummet into the minus 20s tonight.

Thanks for nothing, Willie!