Freeze

Today was one of those days of which I’d rather not have too many.   There wasn’t any one event that was especially heinous, just a string of cranky people and whacked out happenings that catapulted me into a that foul kind of mood where someone cuts you off in traffic and you’re screaming obscenities before you even realize your mouth is moving.  You could tell a storm was coming because everyone had that on-the-ledge temperament you get when the barometric pressure goes all wackadoodle.

Tonight’s storm is supposed to be a doozie.  This morning it was -5F when I was driving to work, and it’s supposed to be colder than that tonight and for the weekend.   I must admit, these really cold winter storms freak me out.  It’s not the kind of freak where I’m scared of the wind or anything.  It’s the “ok what’s going to go wrong this time” kind of freak.

We live on the outskirts of town in an unincorporated area where we don’t have niceties like city water.  We have our own well with a pump house that hides the pressure tank and all that jazz.  It’s cute and it looks all old-west but it’s the bane of my existence.  One year our pressure tank froze solid.  It was a 100 gallon missile-shaped Popsicle, completely useless and about 500 lbs.  That one cost about $800 to fix.  Other times the well-head has frozen because it has an exposed pipe that goes into the the pump house.  I’m not a big fan of hogging out the mud with shovels to find where the pipe is broken when it’s snowing and windy and about 1 degree.  It’s just not my thing.

Each year we’ve added to our insulation schemes so that I think the pump house is now warmer than our house.  It has tyvek and several layers of insulation and heat lamps and heat tape.  The exposed pipe has heat tape.  We have a heater on the pipes under the house.  We have a heater in the duck water, and heat lamps, insulation, and straw in the chicken house.

And yet every year something happens.  Because all of our schemes are fueled by electricity and when the power goes out we’re sort of screwed.  Not the I need a cigarette after kind of screwed either.

So these storms come and I sit here with dread waiting for Mr. Freeze and I wonder, is my dread the thing that makes it all happen?  If time is truly meaningless like the buddhist teachings tell us, am I creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by throwing out into the universe that which I dread and giving it the means to find me?  Is this an “I think, therefore I am” kind of situation?

Or should I just move to Florida?