Archive for March 2015
Commuting Again
I’m going to take a little sabbatical from the full-time ranch management gig and go back to the old day-job for a couple of weeks to help them process a large volume of orders they have received. I wonder if I remember how.
I expect the change of environment might reveal how precious my work on the ranch is to me. Being able to spend every day, all day, tending to projects and caring for our animals is a very rewarding experience. Just like everything that becomes routine, it gets easy to lose perspective of just how special that routine can be.
Even though I am often bothered throughout my day with responding to the constant demands Delilah puts on me, I expect that she may be one of the things (that doesn’t sound right, she’s not a ‘thing’) I miss while being away at the work-place.
Yesterday, I needed to make a run to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy, and I decided to bring her along for the ride. She doesn’t usually ride in the car with us, unless on a trip to the vet. To keep from putting her in the kennel (since unbeknownst to her she will have some day-long stints there starting today), I chose to give her an opportunity to ride in the car when it didn’t end up with a vet visit. She got a bonus when the pharmacist tossed a couple of dog treats in with the drugs.
Here’s hoping I am able to help the work-place get caught up, our animals will do okay with me being gone again, I manage to stay awake while driving to and from work, and that I discover how unconscious of my exceptional situation I have grown in the time since I first made the transition back in July.
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Draining Now
It got warm enough to melt a lot of snow yesterday. I was happy to see the drainage ditch we put in last fall is working just like we hoped it would. It’s a bit harder to know how much the drain tile is helping, since it is buried. I don’t see any obvious flow out of the ends yet, but I would assume the ground is still frozen down that low and water isn’t making it into the tubes.
Once all the snow is melted, I expect to be able to see the ground drying out quicker. That will be my evidence that the drain tile is working for us.
Even though I tried to be careful about where I piled snow when I plowed and shoveled this winter, a fair amount accumulated in the areas above the paddock, but downhill from the buried drain tile. The water from that melting snow will flow right into the paddocks. Once all that snow is gone though, there should be little in the way of additional melt-water keeping the ground in there saturated.
The amount of snow we had on the ground this year when the warm weather arrived was much less than we were forced to deal with last year. I consider this a pretty genteel test, in comparison, and am expecting to see good results. Although, there is also a risk that we will end up enjoying paddocks that are too dry, as a result of drought conditions, not just due to our drainage work.
It would be a case of getting too much of a good dryness thing.
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Amazing Journey
I used to live in a city neighborhood and I used to live in a suburb. Now I live in a rural setting. The differences are dramatic, as well as subtle. The common element of each is, me. Obviously, I bring my perspective to each setting. The different environments influence me, yet I interpret each place through my personal filter.
As a human being, my filter is basically similar to all the other humans interpreting their environmental influences. I feel what everyone feels about each of the three habitats. As an individual, my perspective is not identical to all others, but specific to me. We can generalize about the hectic pace of crowded places and the mellowness of open land, but individuals have the capacity to find their own mellowness in a hectic environment, or excitement over all that is found in being alone and outdoors.
People have the ability to compartmentalize their lives, and as such will become isolated and detached from that which is less familiar. For most of my life, horses were a mere blip on my radar. I knew of people who were horse lovers, but I was not so inclined. I married a person who was interested in horses, but she was far from consumed with a focus on them, so the impact on me was negligible.
Now I have a close relationship with a herd of 4 horses. I have become another person in a huge group of people with strong interests in horses. I am new to this group, and I bring my unique perspective, but I expect that I appear to the rest of the world as just another horse lover. On the surface, that is accurate, but there is more depth to all of our stories and I am inspired to figure out what about mine I should be endeavoring to tell.
Some days my amazing journey leaves me speechless. Oftentimes, I simply write about what I do, putting one foot in front of the other and tending to daily chores. There is more to it, I know, and I have a sense it is percolating within me in preparation for being told.
I’m letting it simmer a bit, while continuing to embrace and savor the breadth and depth of my wild ride.
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Melt Begins
In a short few days we have moved from below-zero bone chilling cold to above freezing high temperatures. On Friday I removed the blankets from our horses and brushed out their shedding coats. The prediction is for a string of days with high temps in the 50’s° (F) this week. For each day that new bare ground becomes exposed due to loss of snow cover, the odds improve for the air temperature to increase.
That snow on the ground acts as a natural cooler, so even though the sun shines bright, the breeze flowing across the white landscape remains chilly. Once the snow is gone, the ground warms significantly and the air then follows suit.
The horses were quick to soak up the direct rays after their blankets came off, which put them in serious napping mode. I think Hunter was planning on getting a drink, but then just fell asleep when he got to the waterer.
Our friends, Barb and Mike arrived Friday afternoon for a sleepover visit, making the weekend feel like a holiday to us. We consumed massive amounts of all too sweet calories (think, Cyndie’s gooey caramel rolls and puppy dog tails, along with some birthday cake and chocolate covered strawberries), walked the labyrinth and wooded trails in the moonlight, communed with the horses, and enjoyed an extended visit with neighbor, George Walker.
We wanted to connect George with Mike so they could talk “flight-speak.” George is working on getting his pilot’s license, when not trimming horse’s hooves or tending to their CSA farm. To the rest of us, much of their conversation sounded like a foreign language with the acronyms and specific phraseology.
I was able to enlist Mike’s adventurous energy to help work on cutting down a long-dead tree limb that was hung up in the “Y” of an adjacent tree. We got most of the easier portions down, but the main trunk turned out to be too much for the rope-saw I was trying to use.
When George heard about our plan, he suggested we borrow his friend’s “state-fair chainsaw.”
Huh?
He said it is a “chainsaw on a stick.”
We couldn’t get the rope-saw to orient over the trunk correctly, teeth down, and in our unsuccessful effort to forge ahead with hope it would eventually get a bite and right itself, the connecting cord between the chain and the one handle began to fray. All we did to the tree was rub the bark off that spot.
I went to get my pole-saw and we took down the smaller branches we could reach, leaving the main trunk for another time. Probably a time when I talk to George about borrowing that state-fair chainsaw.
Today we are off to visit Elysa’s house to help with a bit of spring cleaning. I won’t be around to witness how the second day of big melting progresses. I expect to be shocked at how much ground becomes exposed, though that will be thrilling, too. I need the ground to warm enough to thaw out the drain tile we had buried last fall.
That has my full attention this spring, in hopes of learning whether we will achieve the improvements we seek.
Happy (grumble, grumble) Daylight Saving Time day.
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Grand Unveiling
Our master plan has come another step forward toward possibly actually playing out someday. We now have a logo for Wintervale Ranch.
Based on your perception of us, gained through reading the ongoing adventures I have chronicled here, or if you’ve known us longer than I’ve been blogging, how well do you think this fits us? Can you see Legacy in that face? He was the model.
Guess it’s time to crank up the marketing campaign and splash our brand all over the target audience. I wonder what our Superbowl commercial will be like next year…
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Fond Remembering
Gary and me
Last night I had dinner with precious friends at Gary Larson’s house about 65 miles west of where I live. It is always so very worth the long drive to be present for these gatherings.
Gary and I were thinking along the same lines when we both marveled about having met each other on one of Jim Klobuchar’s annual June bike trips and soon after, traveled together on the trek in Nepal in 2009.
That trip was one of the reasons I had my long hair put into dreadlocks and it was the catalyst for my starting this blog. I’ve been posting every day ever since.
The dreadlocks, though I miss them in many ways, didn’t last as long.
David Piper took this shot of me overlooking Namche Bazaar
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Two Extremes
Our weather went from one extreme to another in the span of daylight hours. A snow event had been predicted to start around 3:00 a.m., but when we woke up at 6:00, there was no snow yet. Cyndie began to prepare to visit the exercise machines at her physical therapy office before work, but she hadn’t finished getting ready when the snow started falling with intensity.
That changed her plans and she skipped the exercise in order to head straight to work. The updated forecast now indicated we might get up to an inch, which I believed was a result of the delayed onset of precipitation. At the rate it was coming down, it seemed to me we were going to exceed that total.
I took a picture while Delilah and I were forging our way around the property through the storm.
As soon as it started to let up and the radar indicated there wasn’t much of substance still on the way, I started shoveling. The temperature was still below freezing, though barely, and the snow wasn’t holding a lot of moisture. As soon as I scraped the pavement, the sun —through the clouds— melted the dregs of snow remaining.
The area that I shoveled looked like it hadn’t been covered in white just moments before. That inspired me to want to get the rest of the driveway plowed, while there was still enough daylight to dry it off.
Little by little the clouds began to break apart. By the end of the day, it was all clear. Of course, in the winter, with all that clear sky and sunshine, it was getting colder, not warmer.
It was a day of two skies, …two extremely different skies.
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Bad Girl
First off, I’d like to admit that I am feeling at fault for failing to successfully train our dog, Delilah, to come when called, to stop barking on command, to treat our cat, Pequenita, with respect, and most importantly, to stay on our property. After months of confining her to a leash, hoping it might condition her to the boundaries we want her to respect, late last week I began to give her a few opportunities to be free of the leash when outside with me.
She did spectacularly well for two days. Yesterday, she failed miserably. As a result, all privileges have been revoked, effective immediately. The urge to follow natural instinct is strong with this one.
It’s not so much the fact that she strayed from our property, it’s that she distinctly snubbed me when doing it. She sure knows how to push my buttons. I was furious.
After I unclipped her leash, she walked with me for a few steps, then bolted ahead and made a mad dash and a left turn, ignoring my calls. When I caught up to where she had made that abrupt turn, I was able to spot her out in our neighbor’s field, sniffing around in the snow.
I called to her and she looked up at me, but then quickly returned to whatever scent on the ground was commanding her attention. When I tried again, she gave me a stare that spoke volumes. Then she turned and sprinted for the woods at the edge of the field.
It was that moment that felt the most disrespectful. I called and whistled to no avail. I got in my car and drove around the border of the woods. There was no sign of her, so I came back and went to work cleaning the paddocks. Delilah failed to reappear.
She had been gone two hours when I finally heard her barking at something near our front door. I was already back in the house having lunch by that point. I opened the door and called her in. To her credit, that time she came, probably because she was thirsty. I gave her the cold shoulder for the rest of the day.
At least her high intelligence helped her to recognize that I was unhappy with her. I have no idea if she understands why. Hopefully, she will get a clue when she realizes she is back to being on a leash again, every time we set foot outside the door.
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Repost: Weeks
I did an impromptu search of the archives and found something from the first month I started this daily regimen of posting to Relative Something (about 6 years ago) which reflects my recent thinking about days flying by leading to months flying by. Here it is again, in case anyone else is freaked out that we are in the 3rd month of the year already:
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Words on Images
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Relative Something 