Great Florida Freeze

Here's an update to what they are now referring to as the Great Florida Freeze of 2010. The lizards are all gone!! Gone!! Yes, as in "they aren't out sunning themselves in the 70 degree weather". April is bored. She has nothing to chase around the back anymore. Since the freeze, I haven't seen a single gecko.

I did a little research. It seems in southern Florida, the iguanas (big lizards) went into hibernation from the cold. They were falling out of the trees down there. It must be a bitch to be cold-blooded. People were rescuing them and bringing them inside. Sometimes that did more harm than good. If their body temperature increases too rapidly, they die. You have to know what you're doing and gradually bring their temperature up.

Well, anyways, I figured if the big ass lizards further south where it wasn't quite as cold had a problem, our little lizards probably froze to death. They told us to take our pets and plants inside. I guess the lizards were on their own. I didn't see any frozen lizards laying around. There weren't any piles of them at the back door where they had tried to find warmth in their final agonizing minutes. Or do they get hypothermia and start feeling giddy and start laughing and hallucinating first? Anyways, I figured out how to find them. I just walked around on the frozen grass. Every time I heard a crunching sound I'd look down and .........just kidding. They must have gone into the bushes or under the house trying to survive. It doesn't seem that any did.

FREEZING

Well, hell, I'm freezing my ass off. For more than 2 weeks the high temperature has been less than 60 every day. For the past 7 days, the low temperature has been under 40. The past 3 days we woke up to temps in the 20's. Saturday we had sleet and snow. Jesus H. Christ! This is supposed to be the sunshine state.

My heat pump has been useless the last three mornings. The coil around the fan housing has been covered in ice. First time that has ever happened. The defrost isn't set for temperatures in the 20's and has been overwhelmed. Every morning only cold air is being blown into the house. The heat runs constantly and doesn't do anything. Once the sun starts melting the ice, every thing's fine. I help it along with some hot water.
Speaking of hot water, we didn't have any on Sunday morning. All of our pipes are either underground or insulated except for one spot. Sure enough that is where the pipes had frozen. There's two uninsulated elbows that go into the shed. As it turns out, they feed the washing machine and water heater. I couldn't even get cold water to go into the washer so I knew the pipes were frozen. After I put some hot water (heated on the stove) on the pipe elbows and on the inside connections, the water heater started to fill and soon we had hot water again. I covered the elbows with towels and they didn't freeze up anymore.

Nobody believes that we had snow in central Florida so here is the proof. We also had some car accidents caused by people skidding on the ice, swimming pools were frozen over. Emergency rescue operations are underway for sea turtles and manatees. Citrus, strawberry and tomato crops are on the verge of destruction. Saturday it was 34 at 1130AM in Deland. It was 33 in Juneau, Alaska. Go figure.