Plant Rescue
We were given possession of a root-bound ZZ plant (zamioculcas zamiifolia) by friends who were reclaiming some space in their home. Our daughter, Elysa, and Cyndie separated it into 5 different pots yesterday.
I’m hoping we can make it a companion to our Bird of Paradise plant that Elysa and Ande gave us after having gone through a similar exercise of separating and repotting that beauty. They should make a great pair.
While we were at Elysa’s, I did my feeble best to rescue her 2-door fence gate. I can’t fathom how eight screws (4+4) in two hinges completely sheared off one of the doors. I was thinking I might be able to simply move the hinges on the door until I discovered they were part of a metal frame that spans the entire width of the door.
We ended up raising the whole thing half an inch and screwing it into the post. It is now reattached, but getting it to butt up against the other door requires a little extra effort with a lift and a shove.
Cyndie shifted her focus to pruning dead shoots from some very vigorous raspberry bushes along the fence.
When we were ready to wrap up our visit, my car was filled with the larger of the potted ZZ plants and multiple shoots of the raspberries. As I was driving home, Cyndie was reading up on how to take care of our newly repotted plant. We decided to put it in the front sunroom for now to give it time to settle in the new pot.
I’d like to see it turn toward the sunlight and have the soil firm up to give the stalks more stability before calling this a successful transplant. Then I hope to buddy it up with the tall Bird of Paradise on the sunnier half of the house.
I like the symmetry of our two rescued/repotted exotic plants growing alongside one another.
.
.
Love Energy
This morning, I received an email reminder of the 2nd anniversary of the passing of a man I feel extremely lucky to have known, even though I only encountered him a dozen or more times over a number of years up to the end of his life. It has me thinking about what a gift it is to have this kind of influence on others.
For far too many years from adolescence through my 40s, I felt more angst and bitterness about the world than I care to admit. I attempted to mask it from others to a reasonable degree, but that energy was probably always emanating toward people around me.
Being able to know the difference in my energy since treating my depression offers hope that any influence that might linger with people in the years after I’m gone will be a lot more loving than if I hadn’t addressed my mental health.
I asked Cyndie to review the people who have responded with intentions to come walk our labyrinth on Saturday, May 2nd, and learned it is a wide array of folks who likely won’t know each other.
We are looking forward to letting all the love energy of our property and animals give people a boost in ways they may not anticipate. I’m watching the weather forecast and plotting a goal of having the grass freshly mowed by the appointed hour of visitors arriving.
If conditions hold as the current projections suggest, this could be the first World Labyrinth Day with sunshine for us in years. That is a truly lovely outcome that I am looking forward to enjoying.
.
.
Riding Gravel
As nature is hovering around the point of total explosion of spring growth, some trees seem so delayed compared to others around them that I get concerned they may no longer be living.
Cue my dread over the way the seven-year-old transplanted maple tree in the labyrinth went from vibrant to dead in a matter of months when it didn’t sprout a single hint of new buds one spring.
Our oaks are always slower than most of the rest of our trees. The overly tall Miss Kim Lilac tree is already green, and the maples have a yellowish hue in their early stages of leaf emergence.
That Miss Kim in front of the house has long looked confused over living or dying. One of the sections will completely dry up, and the rest will burst forth with aromatic white flowers. It currently has a healthy new stalk sprouting in the middle, which had me thinking about pruning the height down to let the new shoot compete for dominance. Mostly, I resort to interfering as little as possible.
With all that blue sky yesterday and the ground too wet to mow, I decided to give my bicycle some overdue attention.
After refreshing my tubeless tires with sealant and cleaning the drivetrain, I hit the road on an exploratory route to visit friends who live about ten miles north of us. After riding this bike on gravel roads and bike trails for the last two years with friends who have “gravel bikes,” I’ve become much less averse to going off-pavement.
The road tires on my bike are 32 mm and, for the most part, smooth. I have been surprised by how well they have performed on the different versions of gravel. Yesterday, I decided not to let our many unpaved roads inhibit my route choices and confidently forged ahead with the most direct path to my intended destination.
My secret weapon is the electric assist on this bike that makes the effort needed on gravel feel almost equal to riding on pavement.
After stopping for a quick visit and a glass of water at our friends’ place, I was uncertain about which road to pick for my return home. While stopped to check the map on my phone, I was alarmed to suddenly notice air leaking from my front tire.
I placed my finger on it and noticed it was wet with sealant trying to do its job. I quickly spun the wheel to redistribute sealant and decided to make haste for home, hoping the constant spinning would avoid further leakage.
Now I don’t feel a need to justify buying new tires, and I can pick something with a tread intended for a wider variety of surfaces. This will open up the surrounding area to unlimited exploration pedaling for me. Plotting routes on the map is a challenge when trying to limit myself to pavement out here in the country.
That leaves only not knowing how steep the hills I encounter will be on untraveled roads in this undulating, driftless region where we live. That decision to go with an E-bike is one I will never regret.
.
.
Watchin’ Hockey
Maybe it’s a carryover from the US Olympic hockey victories a few months ago. The NHL Stanley Cup tournament is underway, and I’m finding myself drawn to not only the games of the Minnesota Wild but also those of any of the other teams, too.
It has me staying up past my bedtime too many nights in a row and leaving me a little bleary-eyed during the day.
Our games have been starting so dang late. Even though it’s the playoffs, when other games go into overtime periods, I tend to give up and shut ‘em off. But I can’t do that if it’s the Wild. What’s a guy to do? I gotta watch, but it sure stings double if we lose in sudden death a couple of hours past my regular sleep time.
Even if we win in late-night OT, there’s all the residual adrenaline making it impossible to fall right to sleep.
It’s interesting to be so fanatical about something that is basically a form of entertainment that means very little in the grand scheme of things that truly matter in life. It’s a little crazy to sacrifice a good night’s sleep over a hockey game.
I’m glad I have the luxury of not needing to show up at a workplace this morning. Still, I shut the game off at midnight last night when my eyes gave out.
I can always watch the replays.
.
.
Sailing Again
The shade sail is up for the season!
Cyndie floated the idea of trying to make this happen before she needed to leave for an appointment in about an hour. If it wasn’t for her prompt, I would have let this slip to some other time. Since she asked, I decided to jump and make it happen.
I hadn’t thought through the steps in advance, so I just dove in and made decisions on the fly. Everything seemed to work just fine, and we got it completed in the allotted time. Later, on a walk with Asher, I spotted Mia already standing with her head and neck within the shadow. It is a wonderful reward every time I see them taking advantage of the shade.
While Cyndie was waiting for me to retrieve a second ladder, she noticed the horses’ eyes were getting swarmed by flies. Seems early to me for them to need masks already, but why wait?
Not long after, I spotted one of the gray masks on the ground in the hay field. It was Swings who had wriggled her way free of it. I waited until they were eating their afternoon feed to offer Swings a different version of mask, and she willingly accepted it.
I think the masks are begrudgingly accepted by the horses as a necessary evil. The face coverings are annoying, but not as annoying as the flies.
.
.
Painful Dislocation
What a way to wake up. All she did was sit up in bed, and suddenly Cyndie yelped that her jaw had dislocated. We were both dumbfounded. While she whimpered in pain and desperately tried to self-analyze what was going on and how to resolve it, I felt totally incapable of doing anything to help.
I’ve had my jaw pop out of joint before, and it was incredibly painful and scary, but it was only momentary. With no logical trigger for what had occurred to Cyndie, we feared that a correction may be beyond our reach. I wondered if I would be driving her to urgent care, and whether I should try to take care of the dog and horses before going, when Cyndie reported she had managed to get her jaw back into position.
At least that ended her crying over the intense pain. It’s brutal to be the observer when the closest person to you is visibly and audibly suffering in acute pain, and there is little you can do to fix things.
As awful as that is, at least there’s no physical pain involved. No one goes unscathed, though.
After a morning that started like that, the rest of the day is wide open for improvement. Cyndie was able to rally and resume her planned art class in Hudson, and Asher and I carried out our duties, living a life of luxury at home.
As I was getting Asher ready to go out for a walk, I opened the door without looking to let him charge after a squirrel or rabbit or whatever threat he imagined was out there. It was after he took off like a shot that I spotted the delivery truck coming up the driveway.
As fast as I let him run, I was suddenly hollering at him to stop and grappling with the ecollar controller to push the alert button to distract his focus away from the vehicle. He obeyed just barely enough that the driver made it three-quarters of the way and rolled down his window to hand me a package. I grabbed Asher’s collar to keep him in place while the driver turned around to depart.
Later in the day, I was spectacularly successful in convincing Asher to hang out close by while I pushed the mower through the labyrinth for the first cut of the season. Mia wandered out into the back pasture to graze, and Asher made himself comfortable, sprawling out to survey the horizon for anything else that moved.
It feels very rewarding to be able to accomplish the first cut before the growth has gotten too far along. The hardest part of the job is pushing the mower over the raised ridges from the voles that think they own the place.
Cleaning the deck afterwards, I scraped as much dirt as I did grass clippings.
It was a good finish to a day that started out a lot scarier.
.
.
Quiet Weekend
The storms that skirted around us last week looked ominous enough that I paused to capture a snapshot of the view as the line of turbulence approached.
Those clouds, white on top and dark on the bottom, were moving in fast. They came over the tree line so quickly, I wasn’t sure I’d get my phone out fast enough to get the shot. Then, as Asher and I were hustling down the driveway to get indoors, I watched the line suddenly slide off to the right just as quickly as it showed up over the trees.
It was one of a couple of different storms that rolled past us with but a glancing blow that day.
After the earlier miscues on finishing a second set of composting pallets, I made short work of it on Saturday afternoon. Now I have two sets of frames to shape good-sized squared piles for better efficiency.
Though I haven’t rigged up a tarp yet to cover them from heavy rains. I checked after that quick one-inch downpour the other day, and the pile was still up to an ideal temperature, so it’s not essential to have them covered unless we expect more prolonged periods of precipitation.
Honestly, the biggest reason I finally decided to improve my composting process is so I can more quickly get rid of a pile to make room for the next one. The horses never pause from producing an unending supply. The fact that the composted result is valued by friends and family for fertilizing their gardens is a bonus. I also use it for filling holes and low spots around the property, but that doesn’t really require the manure to be fully broken down. Simply dried up works just fine for that.
There’s a difference between dehydrated and composted. I have no problem finding uses for both.
Actually, when you find me writing so much detail about horse manure, you can know that nothing noteworthy occurred in the previous days. It’s been a relatively quiet weekend at Wintervale.
.
.
Water Falls
The second time was the charm. Second day, that is. After failing to get a gasket to seat in so many tries that we lost count, Cyndie and I let our restart of the pond fountain pause overnight and came back with a new plan and a fresh start in the morning.
The trick that helped bring much quicker success was a lavish amount of Vaseline. Water is falling once again, and it’s a good thing, because it got down below freezing last night. I checked the pond first thing out the door to see if there were any icicles and found everything flowing just fine.
I was a little surprised to find our deck covered in white snowflakes this morning. Could it be because I did finally move some of the snow shovels from just inside a door to a storage hook further back? Or because I turned off the circuit breaker providing heat to the Ritchie waterer in the paddocks?
There was a thin layer of ice on the waterer this morning that I easily dispatched. The horses will never even notice that it was frozen.
The pond is on the verge of being swarmed with tadpoles, as soon as they start growing tails. It had Cyndie and me chuckling over the first year we found the pond filled with what looked like a plague-level quantity of the little swimmers, and she called the DNR with concerns that we might need to do something about it.
We always imagine what kind of smirk the person likely had as they explained that there was no worry that we were going to unleash a disaster on the neighboring ecological balance, because the tadpoles are near the bottom of the food chain of predator/prey relationships.
He told her that, beyond pretty much every possible predator feeding on tadpoles, they will even eat each other. Only about 0.1% survive to become mature frogs. There is no pressure from other fish in our little landscape pond, but I suspect our bird population takes full advantage of the food source.
At least we now have well-oxygenated falling water to help give the tadpoles a fighting chance of survival.
.
.
Finding Love
The balance of things swung the other direction yesterday after Thursday’s efforts went so smoothly. Repeated attempts to get a gasket to seal on the filter of our landscape pond were unsuccessful, despite employing my special trick of using dental floss to pull the rubber ring into the groove.
While constructing a second set of pallets for the compost area, I put away a tool in the shop sooner than I should have. I was working on the project down at the hay shed. I needed it later because I had gotten ahead of myself and entirely forgot to rig up one of the end pallets.
Wild weather may have contributed to the disruptions, as waves of severe thunderstorms in the area kept the day from ever being settled. Most of the intensity skirted around us, but we received a quick inch of rain in a very short span of minutes, with a noticeable but insignificant spattering of BB-sized hail.
In the time I remained indoors waiting for the first batch of potential heavy weather to arrive, I immersed myself in videos I found where the creator of “The Telepathy Tapes,” Ky Dickens, was being interviewed by other podcasters. They were enthralled because TTT had become a top podcast.
Host Ross Coulthart of “Reality Check” marveled that filmmaker Ky and neuroscientist Dr. Julia Mossbridge were on the verge of a “new” revelation about telepathy. When I first encountered the remarkable things that Ky’s podcast presents, I felt a similar excitement. However, there have been many different versions of beliefs and understanding about unseen phenomena throughout human history. It is not something new we are discovering. It is ancient ways that have been discounted over time as societies and science have buried precious truths in sometimes misguided attempts to improve life.
The fantastic phenomena described in the two seasons of Telepathy Tapes episodes have a common denominator of love. A pure divine vibration of loving energy that is the foundation of our existence.
It’s as if our search for love has become so muddled that we have lost more love than we have gained. How many shiny things does it take for humans to lose sight of what really matters? Modern science and medical fields appear to be steadfastly resistant to acknowledging possibilities that parents and caregivers are experiencing and witnessing.
Somehow, we need to find a way to infuse that divine love energy back into all facets of scientific and medical studies and practices. We owe it to ourselves because it is the most loving thing we could do for the world.
❤️
.
.
Relative Something 