Relative Something

Warmth continues to dominate our weather patterns halfway through December. A headline in the paper this morning boldly reads, “Historic El Niño could be the strongest in 75 years.” Well, I’ll be.

Yesterday morning, I hurried to retrieve the garbage bin in advance of the arrival of the electrician(s) who were going to diagnose my loss of power in the barn.

I hastily parked the bin on the asphalt just beyond the turnoff to the barn and returned to tending to the horses. As minutes dragged on toward an hour of waiting, I returned to the house and took the bin with me, thinking that would result in the electricians showing up.

When that didn’t work, I went back out again and at the spot where I had temporarily left the garbage bin, I spotted something bright green on the ground. Thinking it might be a plastic piece of the bin, I bent down to pick it up. To my surprise, it moved, curling into a circle.

A caterpillar! In December!? Yikes. Me thinks our environment is reflecting the continued warming of the planet. The little guy didn’t even have a wooly coat on. Whatever trees or plants it consumes will be under greater pressure if creatures that feed on them don’t die off over winter. How is the caterpillar not freezing when the temperature drops overnight?

The guys eventually showed up nearly two hours after the expected time and quickly deduced the power is being lost somewhere underground between the shop and the barn. Two clues point toward likely possibilities.

There was a pile of disturbed dirt from a burrowing critter in the barn below the circuit breaker box where the pipe of wires comes out of the ground. There is also a known splice in the wires from 11 years ago when a skid steer cut them during the making of a drive-able thoroughfare around the back of the barn.

With the ground frozen enough to make digging difficult, revealing the status of that splice may need to wait until next spring. The ground inside the barn wasn’t solid like a rock, so I took a crack at digging in there.

I made it down to the bottom of the pipe and quit when there was no evidence of burrowing down that far. The wires are barely visible at the bottom of the hole and appear free of damage.

To help us out until I can dig for the splices, the electricians rearranged circuit breakers so they all connect to the single phase of 120V AC available. Power usage in the barn isn’t high enough to overload one phase and we aren’t currently using 240V for anything so this works for now.

Whatever failed on the one line could just as easily occur on the remaining line so this is something we want to fix even though the temporary solution is providing everything we need for now.

Since winter isn’t delivering its worst this year, maybe I’ll find an opportunity to dig outside sooner rather than later. However, I’m hesitant about making a big digging mess that I wouldn’t be able to clean up until much later and it didn’t sound like the electricians were very interested in repairing the splice during the winter months (hoping that truly is the problem).

Most likely, we’ll wait and see.

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