Uzzi and I have our own Port-a-Hut (that’s a goat-size metal building; you can see some at the port-a-hut.com website!), so we hunkered into our cozy bedding, munched our yummy hay, and listed to sleet pounding our roof.
Around midnight the sleet turned back into rain.
By morning, everything was coated with ice! Lots of ice. The fences, our hut, Latifah and BonBon’s big barn, everything had ice on it two inches deep!
There was so much ice that when Mom came out to feed us, she couldn’t yank open the feed room door (and her wrecking bar for opening iced-up doors was sealed inside).
Dad pounded the edges of the door with a big rubber mallet to loosen enough ice to get inside. Then they saw that the gates were iced shut. Dad reefed the one to the dairy girls’ barn open, it was under a ledge and partially protected, but we were iced in!
Mom and Dad wore things on their shoes so they could walk on the ice. Mom called them Spikys (check them out at the spiky.com website).
She says without them they couldn’t have come outdoors. Since Uzzi and I don’t have Spikys, we stayed in our hut.
Mom flung hay across the fence, some of it into our hut and some to make a pathway to the fence. Then she lowered down a bucket of warm water. That’s how we and the other animals ate and drank until the ice melted off our fences later that week.
At midday trees began to fall.
It was scary for Uzzi and me but scarier for some of our friends. The horses have shelters but they aren’t smart like goats, so they came outside; the silly young rams did too.
They raced around like crazy things when the big trees cracked and shattered under the weight of the ice, and limbs and ice came crashing down.
Then, at 2 p.m. the electricity failed!