Timex
3265
I saw a cat wandering around outside, and thought it was way too cold, so I left the door to my back porch open a bit.
It ain’t gonna be warm in there, but it’ll be warmER if the little dude needs some shelter.
Meanwhile our cat uses the doggie door to go outside and then comes right back in and starts yelling at me to fix the cold. She doesn’t like it when it’s 10 degrees outside. She wants to run around and hunt moles and bring them back as presents to us, but it’s too cold. She’s angry.
I stopped walking my dog because she can’t make it to the next block. She starts wincing in pain and lifting her feet. Her breed is from Africa, where there is no snow or ice I guess.
Sometimes it’s because there’s ice crystals between their toes. You can get booties, or if your dog won’t wear them (mine won’t), we use an ointment called mushers secret that kind of coats her feet, and prevents ice from sticking to her. That seems to work.
-22F this morning. Dogs definitely do not like it. We’ve tried several brands of booties but none stay on (on two different breeds of dogs even). I haven’t tried the ointment but the prospect of cleaning that off eight paws in the kitchen before letting them loose in the house sounds daunting as well.
I do appreciate that winter is a part of the Vermont experience, and I’ve been here for twenty years and mostly loving it, but damn, it’s too freakin’ cold.
DTG
3270
Damn, -10 F here in New Haven, CT this morning.
For the first time in 21 years of living here, I have my first frozen pipe - - now I see that our kitchen sink hot water pipe has about 2 feet of length right up against the outside wall, behind the dishwasher. Luckily no burst yet … I pulled out the dishwasher and have heat on it.
My dog is also having a hard time with it. I’ll see if I can get some of that ointment at Petco this morning - thanks for the idea @CLWheeljack
And of course, the dogs think we control the weather, along with everything else, so they look at me like “hey, dumbass, why did you make it so cold?”
RichVR
3272
Florida Fish and Wildlife has rescued over 600 sea turtles. They go into shock in water below 50 F. They scoop them out and bring them to warmer waters.
Exactly! Except my dog has such a sad look.
You are either buying the wrong size or not making them tight enough.
Could be, though we’ve gone through several (expensive) sets already. Pretty much everyone I talk to around here though has had a tough time keeping the booties on their dogs. We keep looking though.
The ones we have used tend to open wide at the top, which helps you get their feet in, it it means there’s extra fabric at the top so you really have to snug them down. The other trick is making sure you get their paws all the way in. We have ad pretty good luck with the ones made by petacc
RichVR
3277
I like dog booties because I like watching a dog try to lift all four paws off of the ground at the same time.
Cool, we’ll give those a try.
I’ve also seen semi-disposable boots that are basically just latex balloons (Pawz, I think they’re called). I suspect those might work better for some dogs, but I worry about their durability.
Bad luck here here as well, one of our bathrooms (a relatively recent extension) had the cold water pipe to the sink freeze. Since the hot water line and toilet weren’t frozen, I suspect (hope) it was localized to just a small section of pipe, but it’s inside the wall so I couldn’t be sure. Shut the door with a space heater inside for a couple hours, and everything’s running again, with no apparent leakage, so hopefully we’re in the clear.
RichVR
3281
When I lived in Brooklyn the downstairs bathroom would have the pipes freeze. We’d leave the water running on a bare trickle when we knew there would be a freeze. I guess that wouldn’t be feasible where it stays colder for a long time. Would this work?
https://www.homedepot.com/p/30-ft-Automatic-Electric-Heat-Cable-Kit-HC30A/100196471
Yeah, Ive read about heat tape and whatnot. In our case, I’m pretty sure I know where the pipes are, but theyre in the wall, so I can’t access them. Keeping the tap open slightly does solve the problem if you don’t need to use the tap imminently, it doesn’t necessarily prevent it from freezing, but it it does freeze, it gives the expanding ice somewhere to go to prevent the pipes from bursting.
I’ll have to keep an eye on the space where the pipes run through to make sure there’s no leakage, and in the future I’ll probably keep the tap slightly open when we’re going to have multiple days of single digits temps, but these have been pretty historic low temps, so i don’t think it’ll be a problem very often.
Lol, when we moved to Cleveland in the 90s, the first time it got really cold outside, I called up some family friends that were locals and asked in a panic if I needed to let the pipes run to keep them from freezing. They laughed their asses off for about 5 minutes.
