Snow on the Beach

This has been an awful winter for most of us in the U.S., and Delaware is no exception.  But it wasn't just the cold and snow that kept us away from our little cottage by the bay, although the cold was responsible in the long run.

When Doug redid our plumbing last year, he replaced everything but the main valve to the house, and we kept a small heater under the sink to keep everything from freezing when we weren't there.  Under normal circumstances, that heater would have been enough.

In 2014, it wasn't.  Several weeks ago, we came down on a whim just to check things and found a light mist emerging from under the sink onto the laminate floor that we installed last spring.  The copper had frozen and swelled causing a leak.

It wasn't enough water to cause a flood, but it was enough to make a mess. We quickly got the local water guy to turn our water off at the street. We then mopped up and closed the house for the rest of the winter.

Sigh....

Well, we still don't have water because we need the weather to break before we can get all of the inside and outside work done, but yesterday, we packed up Jodie and headed down to just enjoy the 55-degree day.

We always worry that our little house is going to undergo some awful disaster while we're gone for weeks at a time, but everything was fine.

We took Jodie out on the beach, which I had never seen with snow on it. She was so excited, we couldn't slow her down enough for a close-up picture and she blends right into the sand from a distance:

I was pretty happy too:

After the walk, we caught up with Dick, the water man, and made a plan for fixing everything within the next few weeks.  Dick also agreed to come haul away the mountain of junk in our backyard--old lattice, construction waste, branches etc.... We have some awesome neighbors down there.

Then Doug and I had an inside picnic with food from our favorite convenience store--Wawa. It brought back fond memories because that's what we ate when we were working on the house and had no water AND, for that matter, no kitchen.

After lunch, we headed out for one of our favorite places--Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge.

As a photographer, Doug is always looking for wildlife to capture with camera and his big lenses, but I just enjoy the scenery.

Twelve days until spring....