Don't Move to Vermont: Reason #1

Weather.

Specifically sleeting, frozen, or horizontal rain. Oh, and 65 mph wind gusts. Oh, and this happens for days at a time. And oh yeah, we lost power.

Ugh.

I got a text from Donnie yesterday afternoon around 4PM saying we'd lost power at the barn. It'd been raining hard for a day straight, with heavy, heavy wind that blew straight through the barn. I shut both horses in the night before when it all started, and both stayed in through the day yesterday. Both of Stella's dutch doors got shut, but Ernie would have flipped if I'd shut both of his, so only the bottom on got locked. This did little to help with the wind, which just came over the top, dove down and picked up shavings in his stall, creating a whirlwind in the barn aisle. It also caused rain to get driven in in excess amounts, so despite being in the barn for the entirety of the nasty weather, my horse was still soaked. Yay.

I was in class when I got the message: this happens at least once a winter. We get a storm, we lose power, which isn't a huge deal by itself, but it means we have no water. The water is pumped electrically into the barn. No electricities, no H20. Thank God the buckets weren't frozen, but it still was not a good scenario. The wind meant that most of the horse's water buckets were full of stall junk, and nobody would drink from them.

In comes Abbie and sidekick Eryn to the rescue. *insert appropriate theme music here*.

I begged my teacher to let me leave class, citing a barn emergency as my reasoning. She let me go, and Eryn and I changed clothes and booked it to the barn. The road was terrible: the weather has been cold enough so the ground has frozen, but the warm weather the past few days melted the top layer. Add a ton of water to that and you have a slick, muddy mess. The normally 8 minute trip took over 20. After we slogged through the mire, we donned our headlamps and flashlights and checked everybody. We gathered all the waterbuckets, emptied them, loaded them into the back of my SUV and made the trip back to campus. There, we proceeded to fill up every bucket in the dorm showers.

I'll admit, we got a lot of weird looks. A lot of questioning glances as people walked past two soaked girls wearing shitkickers and headlamps, filling up colored buckets in the shower stalls. But hey, doing things for the greater good comes with a price. The back of my car got soaked; I couldn't drive slowly or carefully enough to prevent some of the water from spilling, but we managed to keep most of it and within in hour, the crisis was averted.

Another day saved by good ol' college kid ingenuity.