Deep Freeze

Greetings from Delmarva.  I won't even try to complain to anyone about the weather these first two weeks of January.  How could I when Minneapolis had fifty below!  Week before last the big deep freeze was coming.  Wife and I had gone to Salisbury to get something "checked" on her Altima at the dealership.  All was fine,  except they found $600.  worth of other stuff to do on the car.  While they worked we looked at new Subarus and new mowers at other dealerships.  However we can not afford a new Subaru or a new mower.  This killed most of the day.  When we got home and I rechecked the weather it looked like single digits over night.  I had two hours of daylight to try a last ditch tighten up of our leaky old farmhouse.  To keep the pipes from freezing. My energy level is usually pretty low for a lot of reasons.  But I had gotten myself caffeinated to a high degree and I was buzzing like a cheap TV. What could I do in two hours.  The wind was blowing hard and it was already below freezing.  I took the pickup out to my shed I call a "hangar".  I threw a dozen bales of straw I had into the truck.  And some insulation sheets called "fan-fold".  And some sheet plastic and a stapler.  I squeezed the truck into the side yard next to the north wall of the house.  I stapled about 200 sq. feet of the thin fan-fold against the wall.  Every time I picked up a sheet the wind blew it out of my hand.  I stacked the straw against the house over the insulation.  Now it was dark.  And colder.  I worked some more under the lights of the running pickup. Next I went into the house and started pulling out  window unit air conditioners.  Those window units,  if you leave them in over the winter, leak horribly.  When I took them out,  I just set them aside on the floor and closed the storm window and the big sash window.  Instant tight seal.  Sort of. I did four of them. Then wife and I taped up the leaks in a few other windows with packing tape.  I set up some portable heaters near the pipes.  And when we went to bed we left the water dripping.  That night saw 7 degrees with a wind chill from a twenty mile an hour wind at about 5 below.  The next night 13 degrees,  but little wind.  No frozen pipes.  As I type this ten days later,  the temperature here is matching the average at 46.  Partly sunny.  Dogs cats and horse are happy and wanting me to come out and play.  I would take the airplane out and go for a ride except:  Our airstrip is pretty soggy.  No standing water but really soggy.  The deep chill from the "solar vortex" is over for now.  As for the rest of the winter,  I don't think it will be any worse.  But it is just too early in the season to start thinking about spring.  I can't do that until Groundhog Day 18 days away.  But the days are getting longer.  And I'm back on a rigid low carb diet and exercise program.  And I pulled myself through a period of transitioning to "ketosis" which took a bit of will power.  The odd thing about all this is:  I actually like being stuck in the house and doing nothing and accomplishing nothing.  If I do that for more than a week though,  cabin fever sets in.  As I get older,  I need to move around all day, every day, or I will continually slow down and die.  If I have to go under our house into the crawl space for some reason,  I would rather die.
Happy New Year my friends.  And enjoy the promise of Spring and I am pullin' for you.