Yet More Winter

Another image from our recent punch of bitterly cold weather this February: An icicle hanging from the eave of our front porch after the most recent snowstorm. This one’s about a foot long.

Major Cold Snap

About five inches of snow have fallen in the last few days

February is turning out to be winter packed into a single month here in southern Ohio. We haven’t had much snow until now, but a lot of recent snow and record lows have made it a challenging few weeks. Tomorrow morning the temperature is pegged to fall to -13, with wind chills approaching 30 below. Already this morning, a temperature of -6 set a new low for Cincinnati beyond what was reached in 1936.

I went out to shovel snow from the driveway last weekend, with the temperature at about 2 degrees above zero. It took less than half an hour for my face to go numb. When I came inside, I asked Mrs. SR013 to feel my chin – it was like a block of ice. You have to be especially careful driving in this kind of weather, because even a fender-bender could turn into a life-threatening situation.

Winter Update

The forest behind our house
is looking pretty wintry

Snow flurries today. It’s like being inside of a snow-globe – big flakes swirling around. Cold, too. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Of Ice and Spend

We haven’t had much snow this winter, but it has been very cold at times, cold enough to freeze one of our sumps.

In my experience, sumps are not that common in California, because there isn’t enough ground water there to make them necessary to protect a house foundation. Here in southern Ohio, though, sumps are common, a) because there are a lot of basements excavated into the ground, and b) because frequent rain saturates the ground and makes removing the subsequent water from around the foundation highly desirable. You don’t want to come home and find your basement flooded.

A sump is basically a low point into which water drains. And then you need a pump in it to get rid of the water that collects there. This raises an interesting question, though – what if the power goes out? The pump doesn’t work. And of course, that’s likely to happen during a severe rainstorm, when ground water floods into the sump. There are various solutions to his issue, but the one we have selected is to have backup pumps run by a powerful marine (boat) battery. If the water level in the sump gets high enough during a power outage, it will trigger the backup, battery-powered pump, and the water will still be pumped through pipes out into the forest in our back yard.

But there are other issues, too. We have two sumps. Unfortunately, one of them is located outside, which makes it susceptible to weather, including freezing. And this year, it did. We knew because we could hear the pump laboring constantly – it can’t pump water through a frozen pipe – and yet the water level in the sump didn’t go down. I used a hair dryer (at some risk for electrocution) to melt the ice around the pump, but unfortunately the exit pipes leading from the sump were also frozen solid, so the pump still didn’t work.

And so our plumber came over. We are certainly doing our part to keep this guy in business, but anyway, he helped remove some ice from the pipes. And then we simply had to wait for warmer weather, so that the rest of the pipes would thaw. Luckily that happened within a couple of weeks, and the pump started working again.

The system of sumps/pumps that we have cost a couple of thousand dollars, when all is said and done. It’s worth it, though, for the peace of mind of not worrying if the basement will flood during every rain storm or snow storm. But even so, it’s not foolproof. The batteries for the backup pumps could die. Then we’d be screwed. So you have to check the monitoring lights on the batteries from time to time to make sure they’re still charged.

*Sigh* Maintenance.

SkyMall Crashes

And as long as we’re talking about shopping malls that face increasing competition from online retailers (or at least, I am), news came today that SkyMall has filed for bankruptcy protection. I think most people (and certainly all four readers of this blog) have flipped through the pages of SkyMall while on a flight somewhere – that catalog of quirky and usually expensive stuff that you pulled out of the seat pocket in front of your knees, and that seemed to appeal mainly to the ceo-on-the-go. What’s behind the bankruptcy? In large part, competition with Internet retailers. Read the New York Times article about it here.

Dying Malls: Update

This morning’s New York Times looked into the phenomenon of dying shopping malls that I have written about previously, noting that in the last four years, more than two dozen shopping malls around the country have closed, and 60 more are on the brink. I’ve speculated that online shopping is changing consumers’ buying habits and sucking the energy out of malls (click here to read my previous post). However, the NYT article points out that some experts believe online shopping is only one factor driving the trend. The real culprit, they say, is a long building boom that has left communities nationwide “over-retailed.” High-end malls will likely survive for many years, the article says, but many others – representing millions of square feet of retail space – will not. Read the article here.

Christmas 2014

Woke up Christmas morning to discover that with the temperature outside in the low 30s,  the central heat had stopped working. Completely. This is pretty unusual because, like many people who live in rural areas, we have a propane furnace to back up our heat pump when it misbehaves, which is often. In this case, though, both systems were dead. I was able to reach our heating guy by phone, but I didn’t want to pay him the holiday charge ($300), so we made an appointment for him to come the next day. Meanwhile, I got out a couple of small space heaters and plugged them in, we built a fire in the fireplace, and we closed doors to non-crucial rooms upstairs and down. By doing all that, and stoking the fire throughout the day, we were able to keep the living quarters at a reasonably comfortable 65 degrees well into the evening. Wearing three layers of clothes is remarkably effective, too. (From time to time I thought of that scene in “Dr. Zhivago,” when assorted poor people have moved into the Zhivagos’ house in Moscow, and they’re burning the furniture for heat during the bitterly cold winter.)

Christmas Day is exhausting if you’re Violet

Because of all the fun and excitement checking out electrical circuits, fuse boxes and such, we didn’t get around to opening presents until noon. At our house, opening presents on Christmas day is all about the dogs, who act like 2-year-olds and have to “unwrap” every single present with their toothy snouts, only to get on to the next present as quickly as possible. So we did that, and then we cooked a full Christmas dinner for the first time in our remodeled kitchen – the one with the KitchenAid wall ovens and the six-burner Thermador stovetop. Everything worked perfectly, and around 5 p.m. we dined on juicy roast turkey with gravy and stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans and of course cranberry sauce, with Mrs. SR013’s homemade ginger cookies for dessert. We watched “Sense and Sensibility” for the 46th time (still teared up at the end, when Emma Thompson finds out Hugh Grant isn’t married), then went to bed.

The next morning there was frost on the ground and the house was, well, chilly. Seven deer wandered (actually, “moze-eed” would probably better describe their behavior) across the barren area we recently had cleared in the woods behind our house. This would be the two does and their five yearling offspring, now pretty hefty, who live in the neighborhood forest. At about noon, the heating guy showed up and fixed the furnace with $10 fuse that had burned out. I can’t think of any movie reference that’s appropriate for that.

Tree Work

We’re having about 1/4 acre cleared in the woods behind our house. Today the crew came to do step one – cut down the trees, most of which were little more than saplings. Step 2 will involve taking out and grinding the stumps, and Step 3 will be leveling the ground and planting grass seed.

A few hours ago this was a dense patch
of small trees

It’s a lot of work, obviously. Our goal is to keep and feature several oak trees that were growing in the middle of this patch of woods. They’re hard to see in this photo, but they’re marked by orange ribbons tied around them. Late fall is a good time to get this work done because there are no birds nesting, and the area is still free of treacherous snow and ice.

The Cost of Government

I’ve noted before how the large number of of local government jurisdictions in Ohio – counties, townships and corporations (cities) – makes for inefficient and expensive government. Now an editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer has taken note of the issue, pointing out that “most of those governments have (separate) administrative staffs, and many have their own police and fire departments, road crews, equipment and buildings to maintain. It’s often not the most efficient way to run government.”

The article notes that in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, there are 100 fire stations across all jurisdictions. “In comparison,” the article says, “Montgomery County, Maryland, which has roughly the same population density and is slightly larger and more populated, has just 40 fire stations. There’s no evidence that people in Montgomery County die from fires or strokes twice as often as people here.”

The article goes on to say that one of the prime reasons for the status quo is that “residents like the idea of having services like police and fire as close to their houses and businesses as possible, even as they grumble about high taxes.” I’d add that another, perhaps more important, reason is that it’s not in the interests of the people running the local jurisdictions to threaten their own jobs by merging or consolidating services.

And thus it’s safe to say that there won’t be changes any time soon.

The Coywolves Are Here

And it’s not good news for pet owners – large wolf/coyote hybrids that developed north of the Great Lakes region have been steadily moving south in recent years, and have been spotted around Cincinnati. Coywolves are a cross between western coyotes and the Eastern Red Wolf. Some experts refer to them as eastern coyotes, but they’re significantly larger and huskier than western coyotes, and have reddish fur tinges. More significantly, they have different hunting behavior: unlike coyotes, coywolves hunt in packs, and thus are able to hunt deer (which coyotes do not). Ohio’s deer population is exploding, creating a savory incentive for coywolves to steadily expand their range.

Coywolf (courtesy Eastern Coyote Research)

We’ve seen them on a couple of occasions, including one time when we saw a pair working in tandem to try to bring down a deer. One coywolf chased the deer toward another coywolf that lay hiding nearby in tall grass; the second animal sprang up and joined the chase when the deer approached. That time, the deer escaped. Those coywolves looked more like husky, reddish German shepherds than the thin, scraggly coyotes we saw on many occasions in California.

Southern Ohio needs a natural predator to reduce the local deer population, for sure; human hunters kill many, but the overall deer population is expanding anyway. Still, I worry about our dogs, particularly our Brittany spaniel; with her smallish size and snow-white fur, she couldn’t stand out more to a predator if she had a target painted on her back.