I just got to do
some ice carving work for the first time in probably 25 years!
In culinary
school we learned a little about ice carving - creating centerpieces, punch
bowls, display bases for seafood etc. It
was part of the garde manger (cold kitchen) and buffet classes. We'd take big, clear, very heavy blocks of
ice, temper them so they weren't too brittle, and using a variety of tools from
long-handles chisels and shavers to chain saws and blow torches try to coax a
recognizable shape out of it before we froze our fingers off or whittled it
down to the size of a large ice cube.
I can
remember working on a set of initials J, &, and W (for Johnson & Wales, the
name of the school) and helping on a mermaid carving. The truth is that none of us got to do very
much individually on the pieces as there were usually 4 or 5 people assigned to
each block.
After
leaving school, once I was in the field, I got the chance to do a few more
while working at resorts and hotels. It
was fun work but, despite being a pretty artistic guy in general, ice never
really clicked as a medium for me. I
think I just never really cared for working in soaking wet clothes and shoes
and freezing my parts off.
Fast forward
to this week on the Ranch
It's been a
really long time since I've done any ice carving but I got my chance this week.
A strong and
bitterly cold winter weather front moved into the state last Saturday (New
Years Day) bringing with it about ten inches of snow to the ranch. Even though
we're in Arizona, we are high elevation (about 6000 feet above sea level) so
it's not unusual for us to get winter snow.
We've had snow storms dropping over 24" at a time but usually it
has melted in a few days. The reason for
that is that our normal average daytime high temperatures are in the high 40's
and low 50's, even in mid winter. Not so
this week.
The snow,
this time, was accompanied by near record-making cold temperatures. Our on-ranch weather station recorded minus
10.1 degrees F on New Years Day (several of our neighbors recorded temps around
-20F) and we had 4 straight days when
the temperature never got above freezing and another where it only got into the
mid 30's. Not much chance for thawing
and, a week later there is still significant snow cover over much of the Ranch.
This kind of
extended cold snap is very unusual for us here and not many placed are built
with it in mind. The result: a LOT of
frozen water lines and pipes. The
plumbers and well guys all over northern AZ have been working their butts off
for a week trying to get people thawed and repaired - and not just us folks in
the boonies either. Lots of businesses
and homes in town are still frozen up solid.
Here at the Ranch we were lucky.
The cold made keeping the animals watered outside a tough and constant
chore but the buildings were fine and our pipes never froze.
On Thursday
I noticed that our water pressure seemed a bit low so I went over to check out
our pressure pump. It was running but
pressure was not building. Never a good
sign. I turned it off and tried to prime
it but there was apparently no water being fed to it from our 4500 holding tank
up at the well. A very bad sign so I
went up to the well and found the tank empty.
It was a
sunny and warmer day (our high was 37) so the solar pump should have been
cranking. No way should we have been out
of water. I opened the insulated box
covering the wellhead, disconnected the piping at the union just past where it
emerged from below ground and confirmed that no water was being pumped. Thinking there might be a problem with the
solar panels or wiring I started the small AC back-up generator and plugged in
the pump to it. Nothing.
Fortunately
Matt from our local solar electric shop Val-U-Solar was already on property working on
something else so he was able to put his meters on the controller box and
confirm that both the generator and solar panels were working fine but the pump
was not taking any power. Not what we
wanted to here, at all. We were totally
out of water, our pump was out of commission, and with the big freeze, anybody
who should have been able to help us was going to have a backlog of jobs to do.
Kathryn and
I have managed without running water before but we now have over 100 animals
under our care and they go through a LOT of water in a day.
We started
calling well drillers/service companies right away and, not surprising, nobody
was there so we left lots of messages and then concentrated on how to get water
for the animals to get through the day.
Fortunately our friend and neighbor (only about 10 miles from us) Loren
had a couple of non-potable water hauler containers we could borrow. A few hours later we had loaded up with 400
gallons of water (plus a few gallons of drinking water for us) from the near-by Country Store (at a penny a
gallon) and had gotten all the animals watered for the night.
You'd be
really surprised at how fast 400 gallons gets consumed on a ranch and it was
obvious that we needed to be as conservative as we could be. One of the things we thought of right away
was to melt some of the ice we'd been pulling out of the various animals’
troughs all week. The ice was still
sitting in piles next to all the animals’ watering places so we piled it high
in several tubs in the hopes that our daytime highs would get warm enough to
melt it into usable water again soon.
Another
source was some of the solid-frozen tubs we hadn't been able to keep up on
keeping de-iced during the worst of the cold.
We had a couple of 35- and 55-gallon troughs that had frozen into big
blocks. One of them was on the milking
parlor deck so thought we'd drag it into the heated milking parlor to melt
overnight but we couldn't even move it (later figured out it must have weighed
about 400 lbs). We dumped it out onto
the deck and chopped it into chunks, putting about half of it back into the
tub, and then wrangled the tub inside.
I decided
that it would hopefully melt even faster if it was in smaller pieces. So I got out some tools and did a little ice
carving! Nothing fancy, just some
down-and-dirty slash and chop, but it did bring back memories of carving up
those big blocks of ice at the hotels: I
was soaking wet and freezing my butt off.
The Ice Man 1/6/2011
We did
finally get a well guy out and yes the pump was shot. He had to order the pump and pick up some new
wire in Phoenix, and have a piece of pipe custom bent (so we can add a second
pump to the same well as a redundant system) and is hoping, if all goes
"well", to be back on Monday or Tuesday to do the installation. We
should have running water by Wednesday. Keep your fingers crossed!
We're still
hauling water everyday but it has warmed to near seasonal temperatures for us
(got to 47F today) which makes things a lot easier.
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