Little House in the Mountains

I took a few days off from sewing to let my hand heal and to work around the house. There is firewood to bring in and split daily--we are getting easily half of our heat right now from the wood stove on the ground floor, and the temps are still subzero 24/7. The other day I unclogged the kitchen sink drain.  Yesterday I hauled a pickup load of cardboard down to the recycling drop-off in town, drove the garbage 1/2 mile down the drive to our bear-proof can for pick up, got the Excursion battery out and brought it inside to charge, and used Dave's sous vide heater to help unfreeze the sink drain in the garage... Little house in the mountains indeed. I felt like the Laura Ingalls Wilder of the 21st century.

Everything I have done recently has been driven by the cold (or the snow). I bought a manual, hydraulic log splitter in Missoula recently to replace the electric one we had in Austin. The electric one had trouble working when the temps were in the 30's-40's, and I couldn't see see any way it would be useful up here so we sold it. The new one has two handles to work back and forth to split the logs. It's a decent upper body workout, and no one is going to trust me anywhere near an ax or a hatchet. We put it inside on the ground floor by the patio door, and every day we bring in three loads of wood and split it. It's messy--but warm!

Driving the cardboard to recycling was more to make sure my old Ford pickup would start--and to get the garbage to the bin--than for a burning need to rid myself of cardboard. Dave and I will be driving the pick-up to the airport in Missoula on Thursday before flying back to Austin for a week. We have to leave the 4Runner for Jessie as her car can't get through the snow drifts on the drive. You have to have 4WD to get up to us now. I even got stuck in a snowdrift with the 4Rrunner on North Reservoir Road the other night while driving it to pick Jessie up from a friend's during a snowstorm. Fortunately a very nice man in a big truck came from the other direction five minutes after I got stuck (one of only two cars I had seen on the road at all) and used a chain to pull me out of the drift. On the way home after getting Jessie, we came across two other big men with two big trucks who had managed to both get stuck in the snow--and entirely block the road. There was nothing we could do to help them--and they had help on the way anyway--so we turned around (very carefully) and went back to find another road home.

But back to the cold and my plumbing adventures. One of the first nights of this cold front the kitchen sink wouldn't drain. I tried snaking it, but still couldn't get it to work. So the next day I took it apart underneath and let all the water run into a bucket. When I looked in the p-trap (the curved drain pipe under the sink for you non-plumbers) it had an inch-thick plug of solidified fat in it! It was cold enough in the house that the fat solidified and I couldn't even melt it all with hot water. That never happened in Austin!

The same day as the first plumbing adventure, I thought it might be a good idea to let a faucet drip in the garage so the pipes wouldn't freeze. Yesterday I went out and saw that the faucet was still dripping, and the sink was half full of... ice. I ran some hot water into it and stirred it around, but it still didn't melt enough to drain. So I got Dave sous vide heater, put it in the sink, plugged it in, and set it to 165 degrees. Periodically over the next several hours I checked it, and even when the water registered 145 degrees, the sink still wouldn't drain. By this time it was 10:00 at night and I didn't want to leave the sous vide heater plugged in and running all night because as soon as it heated the water enough, it would all run out of the sink and leave the heater running dry.

When I felt the pipe under the sink, the first 12 inches of it were warm, but the next section--and the p-trap below it--weren't. Pushing up my sleeves (and not bothering with shoes or a coat--at least I was on a rubber mat in the garage with bare feet), I put a big cooler under the sink and unscrewed the pipes. This p-trap was full of ice--the entire bend. I cleaned it all out with the hot water from the sink and left it to dry overnight. Today I will put the pipes back on--and then drill out the elk antler for the coat. Just another day in the Great White North!