Archive for January 2015
Winter Walk
I haven’t been pulling the camera out very much lately because of the wind chill that will cause your flesh to freeze and shatter like glass in seconds, as the fear-mongering news reports seem to imply. It doesn’t really happen that way, so I risked cold fingers and stopped during a mid-day walk with Delilah a couple of days ago to capture our scene.
It reminded me how much I like having visual records of what I see. I should do this more.
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Sub-Zero Routine
As we stepped out of the barn last night, after our late bed-check of the horses, Cyndie commented about how much she likes that we have been sharing this night trip to the barn. I do, too. Every chore is better when you can split the load.
The past week has produced an uninterrupted string of below-zero temperatures overnight and the forecast indicates this will continue for some time. The cold gets compounded by some very windy periods which have created dangerous wind chills. To be safe, it has become routine to bring the horses inside the barn overnight.
We let them out during the day so they can soak up the sunshine and move around to their hearts content. This also gives me space and time to clean the stalls. At sunset, they come up for their dinner feeding, which is when I have been moving them back inside.
Somewhere around 9 p.m., Cyndie or I take Delilah out for her last walk of the night. Lately, we have both been going, because we also make a special stop at the barn. The horses stay warm by burning calories and need to have enough hay to keep their furnaces fueled, so during this extreme weather we have added a night-time status check.
It feels like such an intrusion to disrupt their quiet dark space at that hour, so I suggested we use our headlamps and leave the overhead lights off for this late-hour visit, to minimize the disturbance. The horses appear to accept this gesture and remain calm and quiet while we go about our business.
Making everything routine helps them to feel comfortable with our presence. With hushed tones we navigate topping off the hay reserves in each stall, each of us grabbing a couple of flakes off a bale and visiting two of the stalls.
Then we turn our attention to their water buckets, adding water as needed and straining out hay debris that they all spill in there. Cayenne is the worst, as she loves to dip her nose in her water when her mouth is full. Her bucket and hay bin become a frozen hay-cicle. Legacy is the neat-nick who barely drops a few stray strands of hay in his.
As quiet as possible, Cyndie slides the stall doors open and steps in to strain out the soggy hay while I fill a spare bucket with water from the frost-proof hydrant. We do a little hand-off of strainer and bucket through the door and she pours it in.
In a way, it is a lot of rigmarole but the horses understand the drill and tolerate us quietly. We tip our headlamps down to keep them out of the horses eyes, so it becomes this tiny circle of light we move around within, amid the larger space of darkness and sleepy equine souls.
In minutes, we leave as quietly as we came. Stepping back out into the frigid night air, we realize that as cold as it is in the barn, it does protect them from the extreme bite that these winter evenings have been dishing out this week. Our new routine is helping all of us cope as well as possible during these sub-zero nights.
My experience dictates that when this pattern finally breaks, the next phase of winter will feel remarkably warm and comfortable to us. We’ll adjust our routine to one that is much more relaxed. The horses will stay outside at night again, and I won’t have to clean their stalls every day. Until that time, we’ll keep making our special night-time excursions to tuck the horses in for the night.
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Winter Dose
We’re getting a full dose of winter now. They call it an Alberta Clipper and boy did it clip through here yesterday. We enjoyed beautiful blustery snow all day, alternating between sailing by horizontally and falling picture-post-card perfect. Then suddenly at a few minutes past 3:00, the snow stopped falling and patches of sunshine peeked between the clouds. The low pressure center was already on its way to Chicago and beyond.
While walking with Delilah in the morning, I captured a selfie that should become my next profile picture. This is my uniform for working outside in dangerous wind-chill temperatures.
Some of the snowflake crystals were captured nicely on my cap, but a few show up as a blur sailing by in the wind. It was still mighty cold when this was taken, but we did climb comfortably above zero for a time in the afternoon. After the sun set, the temperature dropped quickly and the strong gusting wind helped to change things back to an almost painful level.
You learn to do things quickly at these temperatures. There is no benefit in dawdling.
Delilah doesn’t shy away from the cold, but she certainly is easy to persuade when I offer up the option to go back into the house. She stayed outside for a long time in the afternoon, despite the wicked wind, while I was shoveling and then plowing with the Grizzly.
In this image, she is looking toward the horses, who spent most of the day out in the falling snow, with blankets on, pawing and grazing in the back pasture. I presume they were low enough to be out of the direct force of the wind at that spot. They certainly didn’t stray from that location until time came for their usual dinner hour.
Then they ran up to the barn and politely waited for me to get everything set before inviting them into the stalls for the night.
To top off this day of serious winter weather, Cyndie spent about 3-hours driving home through traffic rife with spinouts, accidents and cars in ditches. She was successful in keeping all four of her tires in touch with the ground.
It was a real-deal winter day of the kind that suits the name we gave our place: Wintervale.
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High Standards
We have a thermometer attached to the outside of our bathroom window that is my favorite, primarily due to the large size of the digital display. Unfortunately, it is probably the least accurate indicator of the actual outdoor temperature because it is mounted to a window that is likely much warmer than the air away from the house. Still, it serves the purpose of giving me a reference for comparing readings from other days.
It has been indicating all week that it’s cold outside. Not that I wasn’t already aware. When we get down to double digits below zero, the cool spots around the inside of our log home start to become much more noticeable.
I think this cold spell has zapped some of my zest for accomplishing things. I am growing weary of the 5-minute production to get into my outdoor cold weather uniform every time I need to step out the front door. I think Delilah finds me to be a comical gymnast as I wrestle the Carhartt overalls over my pants and heavy shirt, then try to bend down to get boots on without being able to breathe. After which, my face disappears beneath a neck-warmer pulled up over my nose to just beneath my eyes, and my hat gets pulled down to cover the neck-warmer so that only a thin slit remains from which I can see anything.
By this time, she has politely waited twice as long as she wanted, making my fumbling with getting the chopper mittens on my hands, but under the coat sleeve, a painful exercise in beyond-reasonable-tolerance for her. It’s exhausting, and I’ve been doing it way too many times a day for her this week.
The only real work I have accomplished outside has been the daily cleaning of the horse stalls —my least favorite task. It tortures my perfectionist tendencies and severely taxes my urge to be frugal. We use wood shavings on the floor of their stalls. We buy them by the bale, and I keep wanting to say, ‘these shavings don’t grow on trees,’ but, of course, they do. Still, they require that I make a trip to the store and pay money to get them. I don’t want to be wasteful.
Trying to toss out the manure and urine-soaked shavings without getting any dry, “still perfectly useable” wood shavings becomes a fool’s errand. And yet, that’s what I do.
The other failed proposition is expecting to get every morsel of manure separated from the shavings and scooped up. I have this sense that the horses must experience a certain amount of frustration when they step on the frozen nuggets that I have missed. Every time I think I’m done, and sweep the manure fork across the remaining shavings to spread them out, additional poo-cicles always pop up. There is an unending supply. It is exasperating.
On a positive note, the practice I have been getting this week is allowing me to become more reasonable about the precision I try to achieve, reducing the time I spend laboring to maintain my high standards. That’s important during these extremely cold days, because I’ve been starting out already pooped just getting dressed to go out for the cold-weather work. I could do with some improved efficiency.
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Cold Care
Yesterday, while cleaning the horse stalls for the second time in two days, it occurred to me that keeping the horses indoors overnight creates a situation a lot like taking care of 4 very large bed wetters.
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It’s a lot of work to give them clean accommodations every single night. I’ve been spoiled by not needing to change their bedding when they stay outdoors, which is most of the time.
The last couple of days I’ve been bringing them inside at dinner time, and then before we go to bed, we walk down to the barn with Delilah to make sure they have enough hay and water for the night.
Even though it was starting to get pretty windy and the temperature had dropped below zero outside last night, the unheated barn felt pretty comfortable in comparison. It’s a nice thing to have this option for the horses.
On Tuesday morning, before letting them back outside for the day, I went to top off the hay in the slow feeder boxes. I discovered that the metal rods of my custom-welded grids that lay on top of the hay were so cold that things were sticking to them. I wondered if the horses were having problems with that. I sure wouldn’t want to put my tongue on that metal at these temperatures.
I decided to remove the grids for the coldest days, and let them have full access to the hay. Horses burn more calories to stay warm, so they need as much hay as they can get right now, anyway.
Pretty much like they did last winter, our horses seem to be dealing with the current extreme cold snap just fine. Their whiskers get a bit frosty, but other than that, they haven’t shown any negative effects from the frigid temperatures.
That’s more than I can say for Delilah. The pads of her feet bother her whenever it gets below zero. Despite that, she has continued to be exceptionally patient with me when I am working with the horses.
Here she is, politely waiting for me to finish so I can take her for an abbreviated below-zero walk.
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Working Again
She did it! Cyndie made it back to work yesterday. A person can believe that they have made good progress with recovery and rehabilitation, but finally going through the motions of getting up early, showering and dressing, and then driving to work in time for a meeting, …that is an ultimate way to test your progress. It’s not for sissies.
With Cyndie out of the house, it was time for me to reclaim my former Wintervale weekday routine. It’s not all that different from the days that Cyndie has been home, except one less distraction. She’s not around.
With our current cold snap, my attention was primarily focused on caring for the horses. They had been in the barn overnight, so my task was to move them back outside and then clean out the stalls behind them. It’s not rocket science, but at -10° F, everything seems to involve an added challenge, especially when it comes to their buckets of water.
The days are short, and in a blink it becomes time to bring them back inside again. Luckily, they make it a pretty simple process due to their interest in getting out of the cold and into their cozy stalls stocked with provisions. That allows me to get back to the house where Delilah and Pequenita are demanding attention.
Cyndie snapped a photo of me last night, working diligently to tend to ‘Nita’s needs. I had to lie still with my legs stretched out for as long as she required.
It’s tough work, but I gotta earn my keep around here, so I soldier on.
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Cold Morn
It was warm yesterday in that relative way that 32° F feels on a January day in our region. That makes this morning’s well below zero wind chill feel so bitterly bone chilling harsh.
Last night Cyndie and I were comfortably lounging by the fire when our daughter, Elysa, phoned to report she and Anne were coming to spend the night. If they hadn’t driven through the blowing snow, we wouldn’t have noticed how nasty the weather had turned until we were ready for bed and giving Delilah one last chance to pee for the night.
Their arrival and report of blowing snow alerted us to conditions we’d rather not make the horses endure. It is a good thing we didn’t neglect them. By the time we got out to ready the stalls and bring in the horses, they were already wet with blown snow and Cayenne was shivering as the temperature plummeted.
This morning in the barn the horses were warm and dry, allowing Cyndie to cover them in their newly washed blankets and let them out for some exercise in the daylight. They will definitely be back in the barn tonight for the even more extreme drop into the negative temperature numbers.
It is hard to determine how much snow fell, because there has been so much wind. The snowplows were out clearing the roads of drifts, but I don’t need to do much work on the deck. All we have is a small mountain range that drifted up to the back door. The rest of the wood has been blown clean and dry.
Clean, dry, and COLD!
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Reclaiming Routine
We are mostly back to our Wintervale routine again. The horses are grazing hay from the slow feeder boxes as if that is the way they have always done it. I’ve noticed that Dezirea and Legacy have no problem sharing a box and eating together, while Cayenne eats alone and Hunter appears the odd horse out. I don’t know whether she is forcing the situation or he is choosing this on his own. He eventually takes a turn, but waits for his opening.
For the time being, we are electing to let their herd behavior play out. Cyndie mentioned yesterday that she wants to get back out there as soon as her strength dictates to work on refining their manners. The horses have probably had a bit too much autonomy while she has been out of the game.
Yesterday we drove back to the cities (again) for her 6-week follow-up appointment with the surgeon who performed her hip replacement. I have a suspicion that he tells many of his patients this, but we are happy nonetheless that he said he wishes all his hip surgeries looked as “tight” as this one. He also seemed extremely pleased with the appearance of the healing incision.
Cyndie reported that she experienced the biggest boost from simply reading the physical therapy order written by the doctor’s assistant, which said, “Prognosis for full recovery: Excellent.“
The surgeon wants Cyndie to remain cautious for another 6 weeks to give her body every opportunity to grow around the artificial joint with a goal of avoiding any dislocations for a good 30 years on. She is cleared to drive and hopes to return to work on Monday. We spent time waiting at the Minnesota DMV to pick up the disability parking tag authorized by her doctor, only to learn we needed to get it from Wisconsin.
Then we were able to spend a bit more time waiting at the Wisconsin DMV office. They told her it was the craziest day with the most people they had ever served, and were short staff due to it being the day after a holiday. Luckily, and contrary to the all too frequently faced reality, Cyndie was greeted by an exceptionally pleasant and helpful clerk who shared these details while taking time to phone Cyndie’s doctor for information that was missing from the form.
Seriously! He didn’t send her off to fill out the form properly and come back at a later time. And at the end of a day that was their busiest ever.
Could this be the kind of benefit one experiences when they have sent love to those around them? We like to think so.
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Overwhelming Goodness
We are so lucky to have just had the best time with family and friends the last 4 days, upon which we returned home to find all of our animals so well cared for and the house clean, topped off with a fresh homemade loaf of bread from our house sitter, to boot.
On Wednesday, New Years Eve, we continued our charade of mimicking being up at Cyndie’s family lake place by inviting everyone to join us at the Original Pancake House for breakfast. It worked perfectly, especially with the added bonus of not needing to wash any dishes ourselves, afterward.
While visiting before our food arrived, we learned that Cyndie’s brother, Steve, would be hosting some of my oldest friends for a gathering to celebrate the new year. With our plans wide open, it became a priority to make it over to his place, but not before we stopped by to see her brother, Ben’s house. It was to be my first visit after completion of a substantial renovation they had done.
Thus our day was filled with added opportunities to be with family, and the evening provided a chance to relive some old Eden Prairie elementary school days memories. In addition, we shared a brief session of making music and singing harmonies, which harkened back to the earliest versions of our collaborations as budding rock ‘n’ rollers. That was a particularly precious treat for me.
After that late night, we arose at Cyndie’s parents’ house in the middle of the morning to prepare for a small group arriving to watch the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers football team play in the Citrus Bowl game. The good food and fine company were great, but the game fell well short of living up to our high hopes.
Cyndie and I were all packed and ready to high-tail it for home as soon as the outcome was final. This was the first time since we got our animals that we have both been away for more than a couple of days, and as much as we enjoyed the mini vacation, we were both beginning to miss them all.
Delilah gave us the best reception, and Pequenita made it clear in her own way that she was pleased to have us back. Andy had taken good care of everything and left us with a warmest of glows over our good fortune. We are lucky to have found him.
It’s a pretty nice way to start the new year and has us humbly counting the many blessings of overwhelming goodness gracing our lives today.
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Relative Something 