Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Deep freeze coming!

When I got up this morning, I instantly noticed that I had no water. ;)  I checked the temperature, and it was 25* outside.  It took until 10:30 for the water hose to defrost.  Hmmm, it got a lot colder last night than predicted.  It's supposed to be above freezing for the next two nights, but then we are in for three miserably freezing nights and days.  Normally I would just unhook the hose and use my fresh water tank.  The problem is that I have very little potable water left in the tank, and I really don't want to fill the tank with the water available out of the hookups here.  No one drinks that water.  We get our drinking water at the community building where a new 20 gallon reverse osmosis machine purifies the water.

I decided to give Stephanie, the volunteer coordinator, a call to see if the refuge had any heat strips that I could use on the hose.  It turns out that at the weekly staff meeting, keeping the volunteers comfortable came up for an extended discussion.




This was the result of part of that discussion.  The hose was lifted off of the ground and insulated.  I hope that works.

The other part of the discussion centered around the rodent problem.  The refuge has decided to move forward with using poison (this is not usually done on a refuge) in addition with supplying me with six more glue traps.  The glue traps I put out myself  haven't caught a thing yet.  I set up three of the new traps on the outside of the rig.  One in the engine compartment, one in the generator compartment, and one in another storage area.  I'm going to continue to use the snap type traps inside the rig.  So, all in all, I have nine traps set in a 29' rig!  The body count so far has risen to 17 in the last two weeks....all caught inside the rig.  YUCK!

The other couple that is volunteering here at this time is leaving several weeks early since they are fed up with conditions.  For now I'll stay, but if I find a mouse running across my body while I'm in bed, I'm out of here.  This happened to one of the fire guys that is in the trailer across from me.  That is just too creepy for me.

So that's the latest for today.  The rest of the day was spent doing laundry and cleaning the rig...ho hum.

Thanks for stopping by....talk to you later,  Judy
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1 comment:

  1. GypsyJanuary 5, 2010 at 9:27 PM

    Someone told me that rodents won't go near those dryer sheets such as Bounce. I think if they are looking for a warm place though, they will overlook the smell of Bounce! I've also heard that they won't go near mothballs but that isn't always true either. I would set out bait and hope they carry it back to their nests. I don't like to kill anything but rodents aren't welcome in my living space. Good luck getting rid of them.

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