So it's been snowing in a lot of places, apparently. People keep posting pics of themselves doing cool stuff in it, like this from some friends ooop north in Normandy:
But here? A light dusting of snow overnight on Thursday. Already melting by the morning. But elsewhere in the Dordogne apparently they had a good amount of the stuff, which meant that naturally all the school buses had to be cancelled in the whole department.....then we had lots of rain. Lots and lots of rain. Enough to flood the concrete in front of the stable. And the stable itself (luckily the hay in there is on pallets). Still, the ducks are happy at least.....
Anyway, last night we had a load more rain, followed by a bit more snow. But again, the roads were clear, so Ali and I decided to go up to the stables and get the horses out. The sun even came out :-)
Found a nice fallen tree in the woods for the girls (and dogs!)
By the time we got back, most of the snow had melted though and now we're back to mud, mud and more mud (and flooding). Ah well.......such is winter.
So we still have snow. It doesn't usually last more than a day here, but seriously sub zero temperatures all week have meant it's all still with us.
This in turn means I've had the kids at home all week as the buses aren't running and the schools are closed. They have now had enough of bracing walks in the cold and snowball fights etc.
Worst of all though, we haven't had any water in the house since yesterday morning, all the pipes out the back are frozen solid and not responding to the hairdryer treatment either.....So I've been melting snow to water the animals, which is hard work, you need a lot of snow just for one bucketful!
Today, after one more of those bracing walks, during which Sky did some skating.....
...but was otherwise happy to get out and about...
...we piled into the car and did a very careful 20kms an hour over to Tanya's, so we could all have a shower and I could fill up some bidons of water for the horses! Then we helped with sledding some water down to her horses....
....and when the farmer arrived with new hay we spent rather a long time stretching the new big bale haynet over it to hopefully slow down consumption a bit! Horses none too impressed with it.....
I get the impression that the animals are less than impressed with the return of the snow, most of them had decided to hide from it this morning!! That's more than one day of snow here this winter which is practically unheard of.....still, the sun's out now so most of it has already melted.
