Archive for August 2013
Great Surprise
Yesterday, it being Saturday – in which neither Cyndie nor I needed to depart for our day-jobs – we set a larger than possible list of goals for chores we wanted to accomplish. We decided to start in the barn, because the 
crew had arrived there to work on putting rafters on the planned hay shed. We cleaned two of the four stables, and leveled the dirt floor in them so we could place thick stall mats that Cyndie recently purchased. She also brought home lumber for raising the walls, but we postponed that for another time, to allow us to get on to other goals we had in mind. (The previous owners had mini-horses, so their stalls and fences were all undersized for our plans.)
After a brief lunch snack, we moved on to the second project from our list, deep in the woods, clearing our trails of the downfall still remaining from the May 2nd snow storm that snapped limbs on so many trees here. We had the chainsaw, a pole saw, our new Stihl trimmer with a saw blade on the end, (like the one of Ian’s I used when we were in Portugal), a pry bar, rope, shovel and rake, along with a can of gas packed in the trailer behind the lawn tractor.
I had just cut a very large branch that was broken 12 feet farther up, and the bent-over portion was caught in the branches of several other trees. We tossed the rope over it and Cyndie and I were well into the tangle of growth nearby, tugging to pull the branch over and off the others. Suddenly we heard voices calling and wondered who it could possibly be.
I hollered an acknowledgement and hiked out of the woods and up the hill to find that our good friends, Rogie & Kris, had made a surprise visit! What a treat. I coerced them to hike back down with me to surprise Cyndie, and see the complexity of our clearing project underway.
We had a wonderful visit, walking them around to show off all the progress we have made since they last saw the place. We paused for refreshments and later, captured the moment with a picture, using the self-timer on Cyndie’s camera.
What a great treat it is to have friends stop by to see us. With the good energy of their visit, we headed down to finish what we could of the lumberjack work on the trail. The task becomes all-consuming and, as we often do, we lose sight of how long we have worked. In a blink, the sun is getting low, and we have worked right through the dinner hour.
Cyndie spent a loooong time afterward, brushing burrs out of Delilah, before we let her back in the house.
Without a doubt, these days are a lot more work than the comparative hours spent at our day-jobs. It was a real blessing to have the surprise break in the middle, and to reconnect with friends.
Thanks, Roeglins!
Itchy Dilemma
I’m grateful that I enjoyed 10 months here without this problem, but that time is over and now I face a new challenge that needs to be managed: Poison Ivy. I am sensitive to it. Cyndie says, “That’s an understatement.”
It has been a few years since I have had any serious reactions, so I was beginning to hope my sensitivity was waning. I would most often come in contact with the troublesome urushiol, the sap of the plant, up at our lake place in Hayward, WI. One of those exposures caused such a severe reaction that I had outbreaks of rash all over my body and required medical intervention to control it. I was told that I had likely breathed smoke from one of our outdoor fire pits, where wood with the oil on it was burning.
If I have a cut, or any break in my skin, and the oil gets in there, I will have a systemic reaction, and the rash can appear anywhere and everywhere. So far, with today’s infliction, the rash is limited to my arms and hands. From the location of the affected areas, and the timing of the reaction, we believe that I came in contact with the oil when touching our dog, Delilah, after we finally allowed her to run free on our property.
It is highly unlikely that we would be able to eradicate the poison ivy plant from our 20 acres of fields and woods, and will be impossible to keep Delilah from brushing up against it, so I am facing a new dilemma of how I can avoid exposure. It is dreadful to think that I won’t be able to touch our dog again. We had plans to let her roam inside our house. That seems risky to me now.
It’s really sad for me, because I was so enjoying seeing her run free. Now I have the perspective that the more she runs, the more threatening she becomes to me.
I have some time to think about this, and what I will do about it, because the rash tends to last about 1 – 3 weeks. It has me itching to find a solution for this dilemma.
Too Quick
I had my camera with me, but it was in my back pocket, and I had gloves on and was driving the diesel tractor. I hit the brake, dropped the throttle down and reached back to wrestle with opening the pocket. I was too late. Sorry, no picture.
But, trust me, it was a beautiful sight to see.
I had looked up from focusing on the digger dragging behind the tractor, and spotted a cute little fawn prancing in the open field in front of me. Momma was wandering across the edge of the field to the left. When I stopped the tractor, the doe picked up her pace and ran along a lane that had been mowed down along the fence line. The little fawn appeared to be fascinated with me, and was approaching, as I fumbled to get the camera out.
The momma stopped, did a quick 180, and bolted toward the fawn with aggression. The startled fawn leaped and turned to run away, before I could get a picture. They both stopped at the edge of the woods, and relaxed a bit, but they were too far away for my lens.
It was a treasure of a scene to witness on my property. You’ll have to take my word for it.
Running Free
Our darling puppy, Delilah had quite a day yesterday. We extended her freedom to run unleashed on several different occasions. It was superb to watch her run full-tilt after the disc we throw for her, turning to sprint back toward us, passing right by to go the same distance away in the opposite direction, before returning again for attention and to drop the disc for the next throw.
Sometimes she comes to us when we call her. We figure that is better than never at all, and will work toward improving the percentage of proper response, so we are considering this phase a success, at least until we run into a major consequence failure.
We had a minor consequence back-slip yesterday, when she peed and pooped in the sunroom. We decided it was half our responsibility, since it had been a long day for her in the outdoor kennel, and she doesn’t appear to be interested in relieving herself in there yet. Unfortunately, that was one of the purposes of the outdoor kennel, so she wouldn’t suffer if we are late getting home.
Yesterday, there were several distractions that probably disrupted her from completely tending to her business before we came in for dinner. I have no idea why she didn’t try to get our attention to go out again, but won’t rule out the chance she actually did try, and we missed the signal.
By the end of the evening, when we were ready to come in, we discovered that she was a tangle of burrs acquired from her untethered explorations off-trail. I’ve been wishing all along for her to be free to roam. Another realization of needing to be careful about what I wish for.
Not Food
Time appears to be assuaging the angst, and moods are lifting for all the inhabitants of our household. Yesterday, for the first time since we brought her home, we let Delilah spend some time in the yard with us, off leash. She did wonderful. Since she was focused on the play, it’s not entirely clear that she even noticed that she was free of the leash.
Before untethering her, Cyndie was tossing the squeaking tennis ball for Delilah to help her practice catching it in mid-air
We continue to work on training her to respond to our commands, and she is showing continuous improvement, thus far.
There was also significant advancement in the process of acclimatizing the dog and cats to sharing house space. The cats are both showing clear behaviors of decreasing the distance they have been maintaining from Delilah, and the dog has actually had moments of calm, or at least, semi-calm, in their presence.
Last night Cyndie was coaxing the cats closer with some treats, and then decided to share the treats with Delilah, too, for behaving civil with the cats in plain sight, and within close proximity. It seemed like a moment of family bliss, and a hint of possibilities for the future.
A bit later, when Lilah was straining on her leash to get after Mozyr, she didn’t even realize that Pequenita had come to sit on the stool just over her head. The dog made a loop around to the other side of the kitchen island, searching for a better look at Moz, and then came back, suddenly appearing surprised to find Nita just sitting there overhead, inches away.
We were pleased to see Nita hold her ground, and even swing to tap away Lilah’s nose when she felt it was getting too close for comfort.
The phrase, “friends, not food” is being repeated often around here lately. I think we are getting the message across.
Just missed.
Ball is hard to spot; in line with the truck front bumper.
Dramatic Tension
The stories of our adventures creating Wintervale would get boring if there wasn’t a little drama involved. Last week we experienced the kind of drama that I could do without.
After we received the latest invoice for the ongoing projects, the dose of reality reverberated with a negative ripple effect. “What-ifs” started to run free for both Cyndie and me, and we are way too inclined toward feeding off of each others’ dark moods. It was as if each thing we were hoping to accomplish was crashing down in a succession of lost momentum. I think there was a moment for each of us where our thoughts were headed toward giving up on the whole long-term wild bunch of ideas we have about this place.
At first, I was surprised by the level of emotion that Cyndie was trying to manage, but eventually I came to understand the reason for her extreme reaction. There is an event in the Twin Cities in two weeks, associated with the program where she just completed her apprenticeship. She wanted to already have horses here and our operation functional enough to allow her to market her training sessions to the gathering of people who will be the perfect target audience for what she plans to offer.
When we first learned our offer on this place had been accepted, I suggested we live here for a year, and work on the infrastructure before actually bringing horses into our daily lives. Cyndie had a different timeline in mind, and we were trying to accomplish her more aggressive goal, but the weather has been a primary hindrance for that.
Only recently did we get registered with the state as a business, and we have yet to complete a lot of the administrative steps that we have in mind. It’s all work we can do (unlike some of the farm tasks that neither of us are interested in tackling, like managing a sprayer and hazardous chemicals to apply weed killer to the hay-field like everyone is informing us we need to do), but it doesn’t lend itself to being done all at once.
With that target date that Cyndie was eyeing, we were finding ourselves forced to try to do just that: all at once. And, to do so while trying to train our new puppy dog. See why I was feeling ready to throw in the towel?
I still am not sure what will happen. We obviously won’t be as ready as she wants, but as she slowly recovers from the feelings of giving up entirely, I think she is formulating a way to be just enough partially ready that she can still get her name out there, and collect names of others who have interest in what she plans to offer.
One of the things looming on the list of “needs-to-be-done” is smoothing out some of the rough terrain and getting a pasture mix of grass seed planted to improve our hay and grazing. Just when we were thinking we’d never get it all done, an angel appears to help. Our next door neighbor made a surprise visit yesterday. While we were talking, he suggested he could smooth out that area for us if we wanted.
It wouldn’t have felt right to ask, but there he was, volunteering for the very thing we would love to have him do. I found that to be a pretty dramatic moment. And that’s the kind of drama that I more than welcome.
Slow Process
Last year, late in the fall, we kicked off our big fencing project, enlisting the services of a fencing company to remove a portion of old fences, including some very old barbed wire that was entangled in years of tree and brush growth. When that work was done, the ground in those areas was a mess of deep divots with tangles of root remnants protruding every which way.
Two giant piles of root bundles and brush were created from the tree debris that was removed. Slowly and methodically, we worked to burn those piles through the winter and spring. Meanwhile, the fencing crew moved on to build new fences, creating our two paddock areas attached to the barn.
The incredibly wet spring disturbed most of our progress and planning, and the areas of dirt and divots that were too muddy to go near, fell to neglect. We ended up leaving them for nature to address. They eventually became less conspicuous beneath a cover of grass and weeds that grew through the summer.
A couple of weeks ago, when the excavator was here to dig the trench for our new water line to the paddocks, they dug two huge holes and buried what remained of the piles of root bundles that never did burn.
Last fall, a large pile of cut logs from those trees was left at the bottom of our back hill for me to split and stack for firewood. Yesterday, I finally got the last of that pile moved up to the top, near the wood shed.
The uneven terrain remains to be dealt with, but 9-months after we started that first phase of our initial fencing project, we are just now feeling close to having completed the entirety of that goal.
Of course, I still have all that wood to split and stack, but that task will get lost in a never-ending exercise of firewood production here. There are a couple of perfectly burnable dead trees waiting to be felled, and a few new ones that came down in the spring snow-pocalypse, that are all awaiting being cut into logs.
Mission Adjust
Since our project of creating the fences and horse space has crept beyond the budget we initially envisioned, we are in the grips of trying to find a way to complete this phase and have a functional containment area, with ability to expand into future ultimate design. It doesn’t make sense to just stop, leaving the things we started half-complete, so we are hoping to bring things to a logical resting point, as efficiently as possible.
We walked the property last night to review possible locations for a planned second round pen, and an arena. Knowing the location for the arena is good, because it will influence the overall plan, but we don’t need to build it until sometime in the future. We also reviewed the zones for hay-field, and grazing, as recommended by recent visits from knowledgeable consultants from the county extension office. Changes in the way we were seeing the hay and grazing areas are impacting the fencing we were envisioning, which is causing us a problem in trying to complete the current phase of work.
We don’t know where the fence should go! Cyndie and I think we know where we would like it to go, but it is beyond the scope of the current plan now underway. Our challenge is to find a way to close the fence line around the old hay-field. Now that the paddocks are built, the fence crew has moved on to driving posts for that project.
At this point, I am leaning toward cashing in some assets to free funds to extend the fence to what we ultimately want. It just doesn’t make sense to run a fence through the middle of our potential new hay-field zone, just because there used to be one there and it is the shortest route. Maybe we could do it with a temporary fence.
We are mulling options.
And pulling hair.
Gnashing teeth.
Typical spousal financial negotiations. It’s not nearly as fun as the dreaming of fantastic visions part.
Mission Creep
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but our simple project to install fences on our property, in preparation for safely securing horses (in case we should ever get any horses), has grown well beyond the scope of our original intentions. Planning and budgeting doesn’t really factor into dreams and inspirations as well as we need it to. Now we are in the midst of a water management project, that was triggered when trying to finish the front fence, and it became obvious that we could benefit from a gate in the front corner, but the access from the township road was on the other side of a drainage ditch. How are we going to pay for this? Creatively.
My favorite camera returned from the Canon service department yesterday afternoon, so I took some pictures of the new culvert being installed, to test the camera out.
Relative Something 