Brr!

The past few days have been very cold, especially at night. The animals are all bedded down with extra straw and everyone has some kind of shelter to go into if they choose. Some animals don't choose to **cough**chickens**cough** and we must put them in their coop for their own good. We checked all our water lines to be sure they were insulated and that the insulation was duct taped on tight.

But yesterday morning, an insulated pipe froze and burst, spraying water into the goat pen. The goats, of course, were terrified. They do not like water. When I arrived, they were all huddled in the far corner of their pen, as distant as they could get from the rising flood. The goat pen is on a slight incline due to clever sweeping and molding of the land in there, so they were safe and could have gone quite a while. They also have large stumps they can stand on and many shelters they already know how to get on top of in case a real flood came. Not to mention all those skeletal Christmas trees they've been eating on. Really. They stand on those. They're agile.

Here is the pipe that burst.
I had already peeled back the foam and duct tape.

Luckily, when my neighbor ran all those lines, he had the foresight to set in several shut-off valves in convenient locations in case something like this happened. Even more fortunate, I knew where these were and was able to shut the line off fast.

I'm hoping the repair will be quick and painless.

This morning, the remaining puddles of water in the pen were frozen solid. Little mini ice skating rinks where the skates are hooves. The goats were not amused.

I was slightly amused as they slipped around on them...