Heading everyone off at the pass...

So since everyone seems to be concerned about our well being, yes we're still alive, although this could in theory be a malicious hacker posting this, to let you know we're OK after secretly killing us for our generators and dog food. It's not however, it's just us.

So what's happened...?

Plickety got a little sick so we decided to head off into Fairbanks just in case she needed some medical attention, turns out it was just some stomach bug some stress and dehydration, which was a relief. She's doing a lot better now, but that took some time out of our schedule both being there, and getting everything defrosted on our return (no heat in our place for about 4-5 days).

While we were there we picked up our four new Batteries (yes it's capitalized for good reason) they're 150 lb AGM, and for the new place, they'll entirely replace our current set of 12 sealed lead acid batteries and probably a bit more (and of course not running the generator every day because they'll hold charge).

We also picked up a pallet of pet food, and did a human food run. Then finally a few things to work on the house (expanding foam and silicone caulk).

Work on the house is progressing slowly, we've only been back 4 days, one were spent getting the place warmed up, making sure frozen batteries didn't go boom, and getting rid of food that self destructed at about -10F (have you ever seen a soda can that froze in about 20 minutes...?). One was spent helping out our neighbors who needed water and had a truck that wouldn't start. One was spent getting a truck bed of our firewood back to our place and splitting it, and yesterday I finished half of one end of the upper walls before discovering that I was a little chilly (it was only about 0 to -5F but there was a 10-15 mph wind blowing through the upstairs wind tunnel, leading me to discover that any thought of sensitivity in my nose was gone for about 15-20 minutes upon warming).

So that leads to today, where it's about -15 to -20F and the truck won't really run that well, it'll start and then chooses to not idle (even mechanical things have an awareness of when idea's are good and bad, the truck has decided working is a bad idea). We have both generators currently running, one for the tent (and recharging the truck battery), the other for the truck winterization package to get some heat into the block (and hopefully to convince it that it's not really as cold as it seems). We do need the truck running, since we need to take our 3.5kW generator down to our place for power tools, and carrying that for half a mile is not recommended without some anti-hernia briefs.

One final point, on our return home on Wednesday, we hit a ptarmigan when an entire flock of them decided that rather than stay safe on the left side of the road, they'd fly across to the right side of the road while also coming towards us while we skittered along at about 35-40 mph. It took out our passenger side headlight (but only the high beam, not the low beam), more pertinently it also left us a nice present of it's entire stomach contents in the headlight itself. However this means it didn't flap around suffering, but was dead as a doornail on impact. Which if you have to go, I guess isn't too bad of a way.

Anyway I'm off to check the truck battery and engine temps... See how it's doing.