Archive for May 2013
Cat Attacks
After 4 months of what appeared to be a relatively equal feline partnership in our home back at the end of March, our two cats, Pequenita and Mozyr, entered into a mode of battling for position and control. At the time, I wrote a poem about the night the new conflict materialized. It surprised and frustrated us, bringing discord where there had previously been none. At the rescue organization from which we adopted them, they had been together in a room housing multiple cats, so we surmised they would already know each other. We brought home one female and one male, spayed and neutered. They are not biologically related, but we refer to them as siblings. They are “adopted” siblings.
Mozyr, the male, took a long time to warm up to us and his surroundings, finding solace as far under our bed as he could get. Pequenita was immediately friendly and craved as much petting and scratching attention as we could provide. There didn’t appear to be any conflict between them.
In a very short time, they were both curling up on the end of our bed, sleeping nights with us. Since Mozyr was almost always keeping himself at arm’s length, having him showing comfort in being next to us on the bed brought us a lot of satisfaction.
My limited experience living with cats left me clueless about the conflict that suddenly erupted. Both Cyndie and I wanted to intercede and bring things back to the way they were during the early months after they arrived here. We have since done some reading and learned that what they are demonstrating now is classic feline behavior. We are begrudgingly working toward accepting the odd hierarchy they seem to be establishing.
What bums us the most is that Pequenita has claimed our bedroom as her solitary turf. Mozyr is absolutely not welcome, and the majority of time he respects that, laying down on the rug outside the door.
Pequenita is smaller than him, but she has been the aggressor every time I have witnessed a conflict occur. Maybe it is because she is smaller than him. She controls the engagements, and takes it to him almost anywhere in the house, …until meal time.
We have two separate bowls for wet food, and they each dive in as soon as it is served. After a few gobbles, Mozyr will walk over to the other bowl, and take over eating where his sister started. She always backs off, appearing very timid, and walks over to finish eating in the bowl he just left. He shows her that he can eat whatever he wants, wherever he wants.
When dinner is over, she is back in charge. He will be totally innocent, snoozing on a chair beside us, and she will pounce up and swat him. He doesn’t fight back. He just takes off running, usually retreating under the dining table.
I keep hoping he will get fed up and bop her back one of these days, but he seems too much of a gentle cat for that. I feel sorry for him, and want to admonish her for being such a brute, but now we know better. They are cats. They’ll behave the way cats behave with each other.
We are just their servants. Our place is to observe and respect them.
As Planned
photo by Elysa Hays
With rain threatening for most of the morning, we stuck to our plan and started the day focusing on the landscape pond. We rearranged a lot of rocks, placed the pump, built a waterfall, and then stacked stones around the plastic tubes to make them less conspicuous.
Cyndie had purchased supplies to help keep the water clear, and set about tending to that. Elysa served as my consultant, giving me feedback on how my placement of stones looked from afar. Elysa also took a turn at capturing photos, and pruning dead growth from the few perennials growing out of the water.
Since we are experiencing problematic wetness around the property this spring, it feels nice to finally embrace water for once, as opposed to frowning over it, longing to see it gone. Cyndie wrapped the water line and power cord from the pump with some vine leaves, and after topping off the overall level with a bit of fresh water from the hose, we declared the pond complete and ready for the season.
We are lucky to have had the help of Elysa and Anne all weekend on the variety of things we chose to do. We didn’t make it to the work weekend up at the lake place, but having them here made it feel like a special weekend, and their efforts provided great gains and priceless company on the first Memorial “work-weekend” at Wintervale.
Little Steps
After day two of our three-day-weekend, we are detecting an increased level of tiredness, but feeling good about our little steps of progress. Still, the grass mowing continues to be delayed. In hind sight, we probably should have put in a bigger effort toward that task yesterday, but after Cyndie gave a shot at mowing down by the road, and got herself stuck several times, she put it away and moved on to other interests. Now we are facing a higher likelihood of rain today, based on forecasts.
I was successful in getting out on the bike, but didn’t ride for more than an hour, because the sky was sprinkling just enough rain to make things wet. It was a pleasant surprise to find Cyndie had mowed, because I rode past several other places where folks were out doing the same thing. It appears that many others are in a similar predicament to us, battling the extreme wetness along the road side where grass is getting long.
Of the many projects available to us, we settled on starting to move a pile of firewood that was dumped at the bottom of the back hill last fall, and then working to recover the edge of woods next to the labyrinth. Before I headed out, I replaced the flushing lever on our toilet. Some projects automatically rise to the top of the priority list.
When the fence crew pulled out the old barbed wire last fall, they cleared out some trees and turned up the soil, pulling stumps, to a degree that exceeded our expectations. Their effort left the area looking rather abused, with large chunks of dirt scattered around holes and divots. But they did provide us with quite a pile of cut logs from the trees they took down.
I wanted to get the logs up the hill near the spot where I would like to have a wood shed, which is also the place where I expect we will be doing much of the splitting. Elysa and Anne dug into that project.
Then, while Cyndie ran an errand for equipment and supplies, we raked down the area next to the labyrinth as best as we could, and covered it with leaves, sticks and grass, in attempt to return the strip to a more natural transition from field to woods again. That is the kind of work I like doing, because there is such an immediate visual reward for the effort. Even though we didn’t do much work on the labyrinth, cleaning up the area around it makes it all look a million times better.
Today, we hope to put a new pump Cyndie bought, into the pond to get the water circulating. Since it is a water project, we figure it will be something we can do, even if it is raining.
Stunted Progress
Despite our lofty intentions, the number of things that we filled our day with yesterday, were but a small portion of what is awaiting attention. Time just slips away. It is our normal mode of operation, it seems.
It was overcast and chilly in the morning, and Cyndie asked for a fire in the fireplace. Elysa and her friend, Anne, had spent the night, and Cyndie and Elysa were visiting in the kitchen, drinking Guatemalan coffee and chocolate. I noticed we hadn’t burned any wood since the power outage of the great snow storm of May 2nd, and the fireplace doors needed cleaning and the box was full of ash.
By the time I finished all the clean-up and preparation, the focus of activity had moved on to other things, so we dropped the plan of having a fire. Before making a visit to the local Ford dealership, to test drive a pickup truck, Cyndie said she was going to vacuum her car, in case it became a part of potential negotiations. That became a much more involved project than anticipated
If there was ever any doubt that Cyndie deserved to be driving a truck, instead of her little red Audi convertible, the sight of her back seats provided an excellent argument. I rushed to take a picture, and missed the focus, but maybe that softens the impact of how bad it looked. It was going to take more than a little vacuuming to spruce up her car. Cyndie has the ability to get the maximum use out of whatever she drives.
Our morning visit to the dealership for a test drive didn’t happen until around the time they close on Saturdays, in the early afternoon. As often happens with me, that visit left us with more questions than answers. We will be pondering our options for Cyndie’s future vehicle a while longer.
Before we finally ran out of day, the goal of working on the labyrinth became the next objective. I really want to position boulders in the middle to start the project, and Cyndie is anxious to begin planting some things she recently purchased (and hauled in the back seat of her car), to begin defining the pattern of the path. We decided to try bringing down the diesel tractor to see if we could figure out how to move big rocks using the loader bucket and hydraulic power.
The results of that experiment left us with one pinched finger on Cyndie’s hand, and some muddy ruts in the ground. It is still too wet to be able to drive around down there. We finished the day by hand-raking the area to groom it. I tried to fill in the muddy divots left by the tractor, with limited success.
We didn’t get any grass mowed on the rest of the property, so if the rain holds off, that is high on the list of priorities today. I’m hoping Cyndie is in the mood to play around on the tractor. I want her to be having fun, if I steal some time to get out on my bicycle to put in miles in preparation for the annual bike week that is only 12 days away.
Intermediate States
We have arrived at the U.S. holiday weekend of “Memorial Day.” For us, this usually means a trip to the vacation getaway of Cyndie’s family, in Hayward, WI, for “Work Weekend.” This is the time when the property gets a major cleaning, the beach gets raked, toys and floatation devices pulled from storage, and boats get scrubbed and hauled down to the lake. The work culminates in a spectacular community feast at the main lodge.
We aren’t there this year. It feels strange.
We have our new property to tend to this spring, and have been granted a pass from contributing our labor to the lake place.
It feels as though everything at our place is hanging in an intermediate state right now. The two biggest projects, the hay shed and paddock fencing, have been stuck in limbo for weeks, waiting for conditions to dry.
I think the geothermal furnace installation looks complete, but I don’t know the status of whether or not it is fully operational. Almost all the work of installation occurred while we weren’t home. Each day last week, I would check progress when I arrived home from the day-job, trying to discern what had been done, and why, and how. As of last night, it looks like everything is wired and plumbed, but we found no indication of the status, nor instructions on operation. They did leave manuals out. I suppose I could do some reading.
We finished digging up the drain line from the septic tank. It looks like the distribution box is disintegrating. It also looks like there are a lot of illogical twists and turns in the plumbing. I have no idea why they originally chose to do it the way they did, but it did work fine, as far as we can tell, for almost 25 years, so we won’t redo the whole thing. The septic professional I have been consulting has located a replacement distribution box, and will also replace the section of cast iron pipe originally used. It being a holiday weekend, that work will not happen until next week some time, weather permitting.
We need to do a lot of cutting of grass, as the growth is so rapid this time of year, it gets long on one end of the property before you finish cutting the other. Julian helped us greatly last weekend, by doing the first cut of the season, but he wasn’t able to mow the back hill, due to geothermal installation that was in process. It had time to grow doubly long, and we knew rain was coming, so we jumped on that chore late yesterday, before it could get any worse. I am happy to report that Cyndie was eager to have a lesson on the operation of the tractor, and then looked to be having so much fun, I might get away with doing a lot less of the grass cutting around here than I previously anticipated.
In a classic demonstration of our different modes of operation, Cyndie took off with glee, mowing around a tree and then wheeling off in any direction, haphazardly picking off areas of long grass wherever it appeared in her view. I am inclined to mow in a line, back and forth, very methodically. I am a bit more timid. She boldly devoured areas that deserved to be cut, but that I would have been hesitant to try with that mower. I was thinking it would require the brush hog attached to the large tractor. She demonstrated otherwise.
Cyndie and I are a great combination. She spotted some mushrooms growing under a dead pine tree in our front yard. I told her they tasted funny and she got all riled up, exclaiming that I shouldn’t eat them until I know what they are. I was teasing her, of course. Comparing images we found online, we are very confident that these are the very popular and definitely edible morel mushrooms.
We started tending to our little landscape pond with waterfall, but finally came to the full realization that they didn’t leave a pump behind when they moved out, so that project is awaiting a purchase. One more thing hanging in limbo. We also may try to test drive a pickup truck this weekend, a task we have been talking about accomplishing for months.
One last thing that has us feeling unsettled is how much we miss our friends, Alane, Dunia, and Marco. Cyndie has been working with Alane and Dunia for much of her Epona apprenticeship training. I met them and Marco last weekend, and in that short time, developed a deep feeling of connection with all of them. We feel a deep longing to have them here with us, and, in turn, they have indicated a desire to have us visit them in Guatemala and Australia. Long distance relationships can be hard, but we truly hope to make these connections flourish.
Our projects may hang in an intermediate state, but our friendships are definitely established.
Dug In
I did some trenching after I got home from work yesterday. To my surprise, I learned that the drain does not run in a straight line. I’m not sure why they did it this way, but one guess is to improve the position to the drain field.
So far, everything looks fine. I was looking for the junction where it splits and heads to the drain field, but I was running out of time, and the pipe was getting deeper and deeper. When I reached a joint that was covered by some sort of fabric, I stopped for the night. I suspect that is the spot I’m looking for, and will need to open up a larger area around it, to be able to adequately inspect it.
It struck me, as I was working, how much attention we put into assuring both our furnace and septic system were inspected and in working order when we made our offer to buy this place, eight months ago. Now we are totally replacing the furnace and digging up a portion of the septic drain system.
At the time, we were meaning to be diligent about pertinent details; prudently thorough about such a significant purchasing decision. Seems like maybe that wasn’t as important as it seemed to be.
We are getting this place ready for the long haul, and we have dug in with the intention of staying here for the rest of our lives. These things are just small steps toward the achievement of our overall goals of living with horses in this magical place we now call home.
Matched Set
It feels a little odd to be so pleased with my back yard being torn up, but it has me just tickled to see. The loop field is actually out to the left of this image, underneath the trees of that front section of forest. It is the ideal location, I have learned, as the tree roots draw moisture up, enhancing the effectiveness of the geothermal transfer.
Everything that grows green is bursting forth with gusto right now. I took a short walk in our woods, searching to see if we have any trillium growing, and hardly recognized our trail. I need to be careful about getting lost in there! Unfortunately, I spotted no trillium.
What I did find was, standing water in the ruts of the trail. I don’t think I’ll be driving through the woods for quite a while around here. It is wet, wet, wet.
Inside the house, they got the old furnace ripped out, and already replaced by the backup unit that will function for our new system. Today, they plan to pour the concrete to patch the floor where the lines come up from the loop manifold out in the back yard, and then set the heat pump and other unit side by side on top of that spot.
Meanwhile, I have received counsel on my septic situation that has me pondering doing the digging, myself, to expose the suspected problem area. If I can get it dug up, the guy that pumps it out told me he could make the repairs. The target zone is about 10 feet from the tank, along the pipe that leads to the drain field.
I’m not sure my back will be all that happy with me taking on that chore, but I won’t know until I try. I’ll be working slow, since there is a propane line buried in the area, so I don’t think over-exertion will be a problem.
When that gets completed, we should end up having matching dug-up front and back yards!
Relative Something 