Totally Tubuler ICE!

Good grief. It is sooooo cold outdoors that the water in the backyard hose has frozen into a thirty-foot-long tube.

No joke. Last night I turned the hosebib to “dribble” by way of protecting the plumbing. Long about bed-time, the dog wanted to go out, and what should we encounter in the backyard but le deluge! The hose is leaking at the juncture of the two pieces I’ve connected.

These are RV hoses, much lighter than ordinary garden hoses and so easier for me to haul around. You can safely drink out of them, too, which is good because the yard dudes and other workmen will often gulp water out of a garden hose. But RV hoses come in short lengths, so you have to connect two of ’em to come up with a hose that will reach where you need it.

By 11 p.m. the hose that was furthest from the house had frozen solid. The length that was directly attached to the hosebib was still unfrozen, so water had burst out of the connection between the two hoses and flooded the patio.

This morning you could’ve gone ice-skating out there!

It’s after noon, and the two pieces of hose are still frozen solid. One has cracked, but the other looks OK. Disconnected that one and laid it out in the sun, hoping it’ll defrost by evening.

Temps dropped into the 20s here last night. At 7 this morning the thermometer on the back porch read 28. Everything that wasn’t covered is damaged or lost.

The citrus are already noticeably frost-burned, even the tough old oranges. Their leaves should grow back in a year or so, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll flower this spring and whether the fruit that’s on the trees — a LOT of fruit! — will survive.

I’m going to be extremely unhappy if all those candy-sweet oranges are trashed. Ordinarily that fruit supplies my breakfasts, generously, from January through the middle of April. I’ve pulled off a few and they look OK, but much more of this kind of cold and they certainly won’t be.

A sheet blew off one of the bougainvillas, so that plant is now history. The others look OK, far as I can tell by peeking under the coverings. Unfortunately the citrus trees are way too big for me to cover, so they will be seriously damaged if this keeps up for another few nights.

Down at the dentist’s office, the staff were huddled in heavy sweaters. They said the high-rise that houses their office was freezing when they came in this morning, the systems having been powered down over the weekend. The receptionist was shivering in her boots!

As for the dentist  himself, he wasn’t too alarmed by the current TMJ spate, since there’s no clicking sounds when I move the jaw and since the specific pain points are not out of the ordinary. He speculated that it was caused by the late, great infinite-loop of an indexing job said to go back to using the annoying mouthguard until it goes away.

At Chuck’s Auto Service, where I dropped by to see if they could fix a busted tail-light, the men had NO heater in their garage. Zero, zip heat. Ohhhhhh! I don’t see how they could hold a screwdriver in their frozen paws, much less do any work with it. Chuck was driving a customer home (no doubt taking advantage of the car’s heater…bet he was in no hurry to get back to the shop!), but two of the guys were under the lifts.

They said they knew an aftermarket retailer where they could get the part for a lot less than Toyota charges. I’m sure it still won’t be cheap, though…. Ran into a concrete planter that had been artfully placed in the middle of a parking lot and painted dark brown, rendering it virtually invisible after dark. Charming. The collision sounded like it did a lot of damage, but no: only the red glass on the rear turn signal shattered. The bulb inside still works, and there’s no denting of the body.

So it coulda been worse.

I hunger and so I am going to see if the grill works in Arctic temperatures…

 Image: Frozen waterfall. Juliancolton.  Public domain.