Rock Work
Yesterday was one of those days when the things we thought we might do when we talked about it at breakfast, ended up being different than what we chose to do after stepping out into the day. It was funny that both Cyndie and I lobbied for a refocus to something different.
I wanted to do some rock work and she wanted to transplant some trees.
We started out by the road where the recent tree clearing by the township maintenance crew had uncovered an old rock pile and decaying fence post that marked our property boundary. I wanted to stack a cairn of stones to more purposefully indicate the spot.
We also dug up a couple of rocks that were pushing their way above ground enough to become a nuisance when mowing. What do I do with extra rocks? Find somewhere to balance them.
I picked Cyndie’s perennial garden.
We moved from there to transplanting volunteer oak trees from places they shouldn’t be to just outside the fence line of the paddock. If they take, the ultimate goal would be for them to provide natural shade for the horses. It’ll take a year to see if they survive the shock we put them through today, but it will take a lot of years to become tall enough to offer real shade.
I’m honestly skeptical about the chances, but if we never try, we’ll never have even a possibility.
The biggest hurdle is the soil. The trees were extricated from sandy soil at the high point of our property and replanted into heavy clay soil by the drainage ditch that crosses our back field.
Time will tell.
Maybe I should think about stacking rocks to make a wall high enough to offer shade. It would probably take as much time as growing trees, but the odds of success are probably better.
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Woods Changing
Fall has arrived and it sure feels like it outside this morning. There is a distinct chill in the air, despite the ongoing global warmup occurring.
Well before the fall landscape color palette changes from green to red/orange/yellow, an inside view reveals the impending change.
There aren’t a lot of leaves on the ground yet, but there is a definite thinning of foliage going on. Delilah and I were traipsing along the soggy trail yesterday when I took the above picture. Times like this bring great appreciation for the “boardwalk” we envisioned in one of the swampy spots of our trails. It is an ongoing installation of blocks I remove from shipping pallets I salvage from the day-job.
Once again, it is getting easier to leave the trail and bushwhack through our woods to explore rarely visited spaces. I think this may subtly contribute to a universal attraction people share for fall, along with the obvious colorization and comfortable dew point temperatures. The woods open up and provide easy accessibility.
Friday night the easy access seemed to invite a noisy visitor to the grove of trees just beyond our house. Delilah spends many precious minutes every day barking in response to the sound of neighboring dogs miles away. Friday, that neighboring bark came from darkness just beyond the reach of our flood light.
Oddly, Delilah felt no need to respond, although she took great interest in our sudden fascination with the mysterious trespasser outside the back door. My guess was the stray visitor had treed a raccoon, or squirrel, or turkey and was “shouting” at it.
Last evening, during our last big walk of the day, I let Delilah’s nose direct us off-trail through the woods along the many odd paths frequently traveled by a variety of resident critters.
I also put fresh batteries in the trail camera to resume monitoring the night life visiting the chicken coop.
It was a very quiet night there last night. No motion until almost 6:00 this morning, when a cat wandered past.
We took down the netting around the coop yesterday, making it easy again to clean the poop board, so maybe traffic will pick up with time. Not that we wish for that. I just see it as inevitable.
Inevitable like the end of summer growing season, which is marked by the first real overnight freeze. I’m in no particular rush for that, other than a desire to be done mowing the grass for another year.
With the woods changing noticeably, and the noted chill greeting us this morning, we sense the big freeze isn’t far off.
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Somehow Nothing
Somehow, I have nothing to report in terms of storm related damage to our property. We survived relatively unscathed beyond the quick return of runoff rills in the paddock lime screenings. After having just bladed and filled the rills last weekend, the chore now needs to be done all over again.
As tornadic weather goes, the impact can be very localized. We were lucky. Jackie reported that the property where she boards her horse, just a few miles down the road, suffered a much sadder fate. Two sheds were blown over, one of which killed a horse.
Our trees wiggled a little bit, but we hardly lost leaves or branches.
The soil is now like a soaked sponge, so I chose to stay off it with any wheeled vehicles. I’m gloating over having gotten the main drainage ditch mowed last week when it was good and dry, providing a clear path for the flash flood runoff from Thursday’s storm.
Instead of driving tractors around, I occupied my time cleaning up the old lawn tractor and accessories and taking pictures to advertise them for sale on Craigslist.
It feels really good to have this finally done, because I have been neglecting it since last November when I bought the new replacement. Now, if I could just reach the desired fruition of someone seeing the ad and giving us some money to haul it away, I’ll be overjoyed.
I will appreciate the space it will free up in the garage, on top of the decluttering sensations of ridding ourselves of unused equipment that is just sitting idle.
If I actually end up with financial compensation, that will be icing on the cake!
The post was published last night and soon after I received the first text query asking if it was still available. I was tickled by the attention happening so quick and gleefully responded in the affirmative.
The response… somehow, nothing.
Really? Why wouldn’t they follow-up after finding out it was still available?
This is not my favorite phase of the process of selling things we no longer want or need.
I am going to focus my visualizations on the moment when the lawn tractor is loaded and rolling down our driveway and then on down the road. Hopefully, it will happen sooner than later.
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Little Scary
Summer is going out with a bang this year. Tomorrow will mark the change to autumn already, preceded last night by a late season outbreak of severe weather that provided a little scare in our parts.
We were aware there was a chance for heavy weather, but after a couple of intense downpours, our concern lessened and we turned on a DVD movie up in the loft. Three quarters of the way into “Trumbo,” my phone went into alarm mode beneath us on the main floor. At almost the same time, Cyndie received a text warning us our area was about to get hit hard.
I shut down the movie and brought up the local television broadcasts to see what they were reporting. The radar image looked ominous enough that we decided to hustle down from the loft and switch the news on in the bedroom. My natural aversion to hiding kept us from going all the way to the basement, despite the advice of the weather broadcasters. I wanted to be able to see what was happening.
Locally, nothing worth noting was happening, even though the radar image made it appear the worst of it was just moving overhead. I put on boots to step outside, hoping get a better sense of what was really happening.
What was happening was, it had started to rain, so I closed the door and kicked off the boots. It finally changed from dead calm –the calm was actually more eery– to moderately windy. I never noticed a significant main gust.
While broadcasters talked about the possibility of tornadoes wrapped in the rain in very close proximity to our location, we only saw evidence of normal thunderstorm bluster with heavy rain in the barely visible evening light, occasionally illuminated for fractions of seconds by flashes of lightning.
It was scary for a little while, based on the radar image and warning messages, but we seem to have dodged any justifiably scary conditions.
Once we get out this morning in the light of day, we’ll have a better sense of whether we took the drama too lightly, or not. You can be assured I will have my camera with me, so I can share what we find, if there is any damage to report.
I’m hoping the brief scare we got last night was the worst that came out of summer’s last thunderstorm blast for 2018.
I’ll let you know.
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Food Love
Thirty-seven years ago this morning, Cyndie and I woke up in a cute little cabin by the Cascade River on the north shore of Lake Superior. It was the first day of our week-long honeymoon that would ultimately include some camping, and then visits to one of the old Wildwood cabins in Hayward and a night at Telemark Lodge near Cable.
One of the memories we laugh about is a breakfast we enjoyed at a restaurant where everything was perceived as exceptionally perfect. The best eggs ever, the toast was out of this world, the service, the lighting… I believe we were in such a state of newlywed bliss that we were filtering every single experience through a lens overflowing with love.
Or, we just really love food.
Last night I brought home Cyndie’s favorite pizza for dinner. She arrived with a package of coconut infused dark chocolate covered almonds for me.
I gotta say, they tasted pretty close to similarly exceptional as that brilliant breakfast we enjoyed 37 years ago.
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Another Anniversary
It’s our thirty-seventh this year. I’ve been writing and posting daily on this blog for over nine years, and every time September 19 comes along, the topic of the day has acknowledged Cyndie’s and my wedding anniversary, and Julian’s birthday.
I have an annual habit on September 18th of navigating the “Previous Somethings” drop down feature in the right margin to pick the month of September, and then clicking on the day “19” to read each of my prior interpretations of the occasion. It’s a little repetitive, but at least the number of years changes in each post.
I’m not sure what the primary focus of a wedding anniversary is supposed to be. One obvious choice is the ceremony and all that was related to the events of the day.
Another logical area for consideration is the milestone of years. 2018 marks the accomplishment of our 37th year. Is the anniversary a time to review all that our relationship has enjoyed or endured over that period of time?
On that note, which gets more attention? The best of times or the obstacles hurdled?
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How about examining ways the relationship has changed over the span of time? I’m pretty sure we know each other better now than we did in the early years. Although, we continue to surprise each other and discover new insights as a function of the changes continually occurring in ourselves year after year.
I suppose the most popular detail deserving attention is a revisiting and rekindling of the romance that drew us together in the first place. I fear there may be a few laws of physics that tend to overrule best intentions in that realm.
As noted, Cyndie and I have an additional blessing to enhance our celebration of September 19th. This year it involves one of those round numbers that garners extra significance because it ends in zero.
Happy 30th Birthday, Julian!!
At this point in the father-son relationship, I’m thoroughly enjoying how much more like a brother you seem to me. I never imagined I would enjoy my children as adults as much as I do.
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Counting our many blessings today!
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Wondering When
When will that day come? A day when the human induced changes alter the planet to such a degree (pun not intended, but left anyway) that life as we know it today can no longer carry on the same?
For almost a week, I have been checking the NOAA national radar to see how Hurricane Florence looked as it spun toward the coast and then paused to pummel the Carolinas. Yesterday when I checked, what was left of the disturbance had moved on to the north. Now they are inundated with flood water and the rivers continue to rise as the water follows the pull of gravity, flowing toward lower altitudes.
Many are without power and their lives are dramatically disrupted, and likely will be for quite some time.
Meanwhile, though the warming global atmosphere is altering the weather to dramatic affect for different locations around the planet (see Typhoon Mangkhut), the influence has yet to significantly alter activities near our home. We are able to carry on as if nothing is different.
Cyndie collected 8 eggs from the nest boxes in the coop yesterday. She decided to try a panoramic photo of the first seven, with some wiggling hesitation visible in the result. Somehow the nest boxes stayed mostly clear and crisp.
I was in Plymouth, MN when an afternoon storm front swooped in and turned day into night. Checking the radar revealed that I would be driving under the heart of the intensity for the whole way home if I left at the usual time.
I left early.
Instead of a non-stop downpour, I flirted with the leading edge at highway speed, where one-inch diameter drops fell hesitatingly at a rate that needed constantly varying intermittent speed windshield wipers, and the frontal gust stirred up dust and debris that created a persistent swirling world of distractions.
I arrived unscathed and parked safely in the garage before the thunder and rain caught up with me.
Changing my departure by one hour on one day for one storm does not constitute a significant alteration of my activities.
Whatever else is changing around the world and altering lives thus far, circumstances for us have yet to cause any noteworthy disruption.
Sometimes I wonder when that day will come.
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