What Fresh Hell is This?

Here's another "winter sucks" post. These will end when winter bloody well ends.

So: I haven't had running water in my barn since... Thursday or Friday of last week, thanks to the goddamn cold weather. Mom and I were smart enough to drag a big trough inside, clean it out, and fill it up, and to fill our little heated muck tub (meant and used only for water) so that for a few days, I didn't have to fill a wheelbarrow with half-full buckets and gallon jugs and drag it back and forth across the ten-acre farm in service of my neurosis about all horses having ten gallons of clean water in front of them at all times--a neurosis which, I can tell you, has saved me from more than one colic. But then that ran out, so wheelbarrow and buckets it was. This was okay until we got five inches of snow, which added a significant cardio element to my day.

Red's reaction when I opened the barn door the other morning
and there was a shit ton of snow.

The plan now is that I take a bunch of buckets and jugs and the things that need to be soaked (Red and Ink both get beet pulp and hay cubes) to the tiny apartment behind my parents' garage, which is heated and has running water. I've taken it over now.

Filling all this stuff out of a kitchen tap takes about 30 minutes.

 Then I got home from work last night and my dad was like THERE IS NO WATER IN THE HOUSE, so we ran out to the barn, and it was flooding. Burst-pipe city!

Water, water everywhere.
And not a drop to drink.

So now I'd gone from not having ANY running water in the barn to water running EVERYWHERE in the barn. Thinking fast, I grabbed some clean buckets and we managed to put them beneath the burst pipe and fill them, and I was refilling horse buckets and our heated tub as fast as I could. That was... gratifying, in an odd way?

Love a soggy tack room.
I just KNOW I can grow mildew in here!

I was already Grouch Level Ten, but I think I broke the scale on this one. Mom and I had to move every goddamn thing out of the tack room and half the "office" (where we just store feed bags and random crap), dump shavings down to soak up the water, and then sweep it up. Only one horse stall flooded and we have a spare so that's okay. But with a low overnight of 10 degrees, we really didn't want the barn to be any more of a skating rink than it already was.

By the time the plumber fixed the pipe, we took advantage of having running water to refill all our troughs and shit, and we cleaned up the water, we were too worn out to put everything back where it belonged (let it dry a little more overnight, we told ourselves) or to sweep the aisle or anything.

This morning when I got out to the barn, I was overchuffed to find that we STILL had running water (how, I don't know), but the barn looked like a train had run through it. It took me five hours to do my normal morning chores (made harder by winter anyway) AND to move everything back where it belonged, and to sweep the aisle, and to generally get my barn looking like it isn't managed by the gnomes in The Hobbit.

Oh wait. I forgot one thing: I broke my toe and almost certainly stress fractured a metatarsal last night. Was it in heroic attempt to save my horses from a dehydrated icy death? No. It was walking past a footstool in my perfectly warm, clean house. So you can imagine how much extra fun THAT introduced into my chores today, hobbling around with my foot all taped up and griping to myself about how I should have chosen long distance running as my sport of choice. Or maybe I should choose some adorable hobby, like knitting.

Winter can eat a bee.