The Cold Came Around And Our Internet Went Down

So it got a little cold for us beginning on Monday.  The temperatures dipped down to about 20 degrees.  That is chilly for us southerners!  We stayed by the fireplace in the evening and then noticed that the internet was down, so I was unable to post last night.  I guess the hamsters turning the wheels of the Internet froze, but they thawed them out and things are back up and running today. 

This morning we got up to milk the cows.  It was cold.  The mud was frozen and the cows did not have a clue of how to walk on it.  Once milking was done, I walked over to one of the frozen water troughs and used a piece of a 1x2 to try to break the ice.  No luck!  The board bounced off of the ice.  Time to call in the heavy artillery.  I got a sledge hammer from my work bench and returned to bust the ice.  The cows need some liquid water.

Frozen!

I hit one time and the hammer glanced off the ice, leaving the type of scar that your windshield gets when you are following a truck that throws a rock.

Time to stop playing around.  I gave the ice a good "whack" and the ice began to break up.  But wow, how thick is the ice?

Clarabelle immediately came and began drinking water.  You could tell that she was uneasy with the ice in her trough.  As she drank, the ice tinkled together.  Pretty soon the other cows came to drink and I began to break the ice in the chicken's water trough and then the goat's.

So how thick was the ice in the trough?  Well, I went to get my tape measure to get an accurate measurement.  It was 2 inches thick!

I've seen water trough de-icers sold in the Jeffer's catalog and the Farm-tek catalog, but these frigid conditions happen so rarely in Louisiana, that I think the sledge hammer is a more economical option.