Day of Winterizing

I had a busy day today.  It was a very rare sunny day and the temperature was around 60 degrees so I figured I should not put off some outdoor tasks that I've been putting off for one reason or another for the past month or two.  I doubt we'll get any other days like today and my health was pretty stable so I put on some work clothes and headed outside.  

First off, it was extremely muddy out there.  I don't know how the climate has been for those who read this blog but I can say that we've had so much rain over the summer and fall here in our neck of the woods that our yard is a mud pit.  This made the lawn work that I needed to do a bit of a pain in the butt.  The lawn is ready for winter now though.  

I fixed our snowblower.  That broke late in the season last winter season.  Because of all the road construction we had last year when they installed a new water main, we had rocks everywhere all winter.  The rocks ended up getting into the auger of the snowblower and a rock got jammed in there.  That required a lot of heavy hammering to remove the jammed rock.  This took far more time than I expected...  that rock did not want to be knocked free!  For a while, I was thinking I might need to disassemble the front end of the snowblower.  I eventually got the rock out.

Then I noticed that one of the auger blades was spinning freely.  That didn't surprise me since the inside of the auger housing was filled with dirt and rocks.  Sometimes that pins that hold the auger blades breaks loose and falls out.  Easy peazy, right?...  just get another pin and insert it...  that didn't work this time.  Apparently the 1/4 inch pin sheared off and part of it was lodged and jammed inside the shaft.  After another ten or fifteen minutes of hammering, the old pin finally fell out.  

Now I just needed to clean out all the dirt and rocks from the auger housing...  but...  I had already turned off the water for the hose so I needed to turn the water on again and hook up a hose and dig out a nozzle.  After I finished this task, I pulled out the air compressor so I could blow all the water out of all of our outdoor plumbing.  This is easy but it takes a little time.

While I was doing all these various things around the yard, the full rainbarrels were draining through a hose and to a few different areas of the yard.  I kept moving the hose around because it was muddy enough out there so I spread out the gallons upon gallons of extra water we had on hand.  I have to empty these barrels so the water doesn't freeze and crack the barrels so I empty them and leave the valves open.

At this point, I remembered that I needed to change the downspouts that drop rain into our rainbarrels all summer long.  I needed to add some elbows to get the downspouts to by-pass the rainbarrels and put any rain or melting snow directly into our curtain drain.  I was supposed to get to this earlier in the day when it was warmer outside because I had some caulking to do at some of the joints of these downspouts.  I got it done but it should have been done earlier when it was warmer.  At this point the sun was very low and the temperature had dropped almost 10 degrees.  Caulking really needs 58 degrees or warmer.

I still have some woodworking to do if I can get to it before snow is here for six solid months.  We still need to put up some Christmas lights but that will probably wait until after wreaths are available.  And, I'm sure I forgot to address something outside that needed to be done so I'll have to get out there again.  Oh yeah....  I forgot to insulate our air conditioner duct to keep the frigid air out of the house.

Now my spine is screaming and I am walking around like a bent-over old man...  very slowly with a lot of moaning and groaning.