Archive for December 2015
Social Success
Our cookie social was a success, despite not drawing as many new faces as I hoped we might meet. The new people we did discover were a wonderful pleasure and we quickly learned, once again, how small the world can seem. We have a good variety of kindred spirits in the vicinity, revealing a number of common connections, many of them being our friend, George Walker.
The rural setting, with many of the homes tucked far from the road, makes it too easy to see less of neighbors, unless proactively putting effort in seeking to connect. It motivates me to be quicker to ask neighbors for advice or assistance in the future.
What’s the worst that could happen? If they weren’t able to help, I am learning they would most likely know someone who could, and they’d be happy to provide these referrals.
The downside about the small number of folks showing up is, there is a dangerous amount of cookies and holiday treats left over that I want to avoid consuming in my quest to eat a low sugar diet, even with Cyndie loading up mountains on take-home plates for folks.
Before guests arrived, I took Delilah out for a walk to burn off some energy and we made our way down to check on the horses. We found them at nap time, with Hunter laying down on the raised circle of hay in the paddock. Dezirea and Legacy were up by the barn where he was eating hay out of the box and she was falling asleep in the sun.
Legacy turned to interact with me, and while he was facing me, I could see Dezirea behind him. She kept buckling as she eased into too deep of a sleep, and would startle to catch herself and stay upright. Each time she startled, it made Legacy jump. He would turn to give her a look, and she would be standing just fine. It happened over and over again, creating a hilarious spectacle.
It was as if Legacy was peeved over her spooking him, and every time he turned to throw his grumpy gaze at her, she was standing perfectly calm, like a little angel.
I tried to take a picture of her to catch that moment, missing several times before I realized I should be recording a video. By the time I did, she must have figured out what was happening and remedied things.
I have a couple of minutes of video showing her standing rock solid.
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‘Tis Season
‘Tis the Christmas season for sure, as we’ve reached the final week before December 25th. If you sense anything about me, it might include a perception that I am a bit mall averse. I do not like going to shopping malls. I avoid them on weekends whenever possible, and I especially seek to stay clear during the holiday season.
Nonetheless, I try to stay flexible enough to go with the flow when events lead me to places I might not choose on my own. So it was, that I found myself yesterday, facing the double whammy of going to the Southdale Shopping Center on the Saturday before Christmas.
No, make that a triple whammy. I was also going to a movie theater there to attend a showing of the latest mega-event movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, on its opening weekend.
I figured it was a recipe for every possible challenge related to having too many people in one place at the same time.
On top of preparing to face this adventure, my mind was also occupied with peripheral planning to deal with our animal care and a goal to also attend, on the same day, a holiday party in the evening, some 50-minutes away in a different direction.
We had a fabulous day. I credit Cyndie’s precious ability to send love to all around, and especially to those afar. We also did some intense planning which involved arriving to the movie theater early. It all played out flawlessly.
I was surprised to find that it wasn’t as crowded as I imagined it would be. We were second in line at the theater door, and when the doors finally opened, we discovered that being early enough to line up hadn’t been necessary.
Despite my ability to imagine the plan for our day being ripe for one hassle after another, it turned out to be nothing but peace, love, joy, excitement, and a fair amount of extra highway miles.
My movie review: classic Star Wars, doing justice to the genre and paying nice homage to the original.
It was sweet to see our kids and Cyndie’s family. Thirteen of us showed up for the flick. From there, we raced home to give Delilah some much wanted attention, feed and clean up after the horses, grab a quick bite for dinner, and then headed out into the darkness to find a holiday party at a home we’ve not visited before.
I negotiated one obstacle in a shortcut I had chosen, and we arrived in good time for a sweet visit to a BIG holiday party in a beautiful home in the country.
The day turned out just the way you would imagine it, if you were to choose to expect the best possible outcomes.
It serves as inspiration for me, to see if I can’t improve on the tenor of my visualizations going forward.
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Past Views
On Sunday, we are hosting a neighborhood gathering for a cookie social. I was thinking ahead about a way I might match the people we hope will come, with the locations of their homes. I looked at property records online for an overhead view with the house numbers shown. I was considering the possibility of printing it out and having people sign in and mark their location on the map.
Unfortunately, that view, sized for a normal printer, ended up being too small to be much good. I may simply resort to having my computer there with the view that can be zoomed in and out. People could point at their homes on the screen.
While I was looking at the county map, I realized that it is a little different than the Google Earth view with which I am more familiar. I’m pretty sure the county image is older. It occurred to me that I should capture and save both for a historical reference.
Above is the view from the county property records site. Below is the view from Google Earth. It hasn’t changed since we started looking at it in 2012.
I did a search to see if I could learn how often the Google view gets updated. They claim to do so about every 3 years. We are due. I don’t know if that means they will soon post a current view, or that soon they will update it with a view from some time in the recent past.
It won’t be too hard for me to identify if a new view is from a time after we took possession, since we made a wide variety of frequent changes over the last 3 years. I’m particularly interested to see what the labyrinth looks like from space.
I’m also hoping it will be from a time when the horses were out in one of the fields. It would be really nice if that worked out.
As long as I was at it, I ventured over to a view of the old neighborhood in Eden Prairie where my family lived when I was a tween/teenager. I’ll post it here for my brothers and sisters to see. It is recognizable, despite a few changes. The road at the end of our driveway was a 2-lane back in the day, and crossing it led to a farm field, not another neighborhood.
I wonder if there are any photos of this view from back in the 1970s, maybe taken from one of the small planes out of Flying Cloud Airport.
That’s a past view I would particularly appreciate seeing.
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Weekly Expedition
Thursday evenings is the usual time when we move our garbage and recycling bins down to the road by our mailbox. Our driveway is about a quarter of a mile long, so it can be a feat that requires some preparation.
Early on, I contemplated a variety of options for managing the bins for trash day. Plenty of rural folk permanently keep their bins near the road in a designated location, and then devise ways to haul their trash down.
I don’t want our bins in plain sight all the time, and I definitely don’t want to haul trash the long distance to them.
One of our close neighbors always drives his down in his small pickup truck. I figure it would work okay to haul ours down in a trailer behind the Grizzly, if need be. We have contemplated, off and on, about the driveway becoming gravel in the future, to avoid the expense of new pavement. The bins might not roll so well over gravel.
For now, just we have for the past 3 years, we continue to walk them down every week. It might seem like quite a chore, and I’ll admit there are times when I’m not mentally prepared when that thought occurs to me, but the effort always ends up being a rewarding experience.
I can’t count the number of times when I have felt awe over taking that ‘forced-chore’ walk outside, at a time when I didn’t think I wanted to, because the experience ended up being so beautiful, fulfilling, and inspiring.
That simple action turns into an epic journey.
I have had the opportunity to spend a week learning winter survival skills at Will Steger’s homestead, to travel to see Olympic games in Norway, to hike in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, and to experience a few weeks at Ian Rowcliffe’s Forest Garden Estate in Portugal. I returned from each of those experiences a changed man.
There is something about routinely rolling heavy bins of refuse from our house to the road that changes me, too. Every time. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how to describe it, but I’m pretty sure it is what keeps me from putting any serious energy toward devising a more mechanized method of moving them.
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Losing Trees
It’s so incredibly sad to be losing more pine trees. Our pine trees have slowly, but very consistently every year since we bought this place, been dying off.
Looking back, I believe it probably started before we arrived. One of the first things I noticed after we moved in was a small, dead pine in our front yard. It had just endured a very dry autumn, so I left it stand over the winter, in case it showed any sign of new life the following spring.
It didn’t.
I cut it down and accepted the loss as a single unfortunate occasion. However, the next year there were more.
Several trees began showing signs of stress and I figured they were suffering from another very dry summer and autumn. I tried watering them to aid their ability to withstand the rigors of the approaching winter. Little did I know, it would be very extreme winter.
I wasn’t surprised when the trees weren’t able to survive that double whammy.
It was always 1 or 2 trees in a bunch, while others, often the larger ones around them, seemed unaffected. I would cut down the dead trees and assume that was that.
Each time, the decline of the trees happened so slowly that I wasn’t forming an opinion there was more to be concerned about. I had researched the symptoms, and came to believe (probably due to a confirmation bias) it was weather related. Knowing I wasn’t going to control the weather, I resorted to sadly accepting the loss without feeling there was anything more to be done.
When we spotted it happening again this year, on the few remaining trees in all of the several locations of previous losses, we called for an analysis by a professional. I had hoped that one look would reveal to an arborist some known predicament indigenous to this region.
Unfortunately, he arrived in the middle of a pouring rain. Cyndie was home at the time, and walked with him, trying to hold an umbrella that kept folding inside out in the wind. Not conducive to making close inspection or pondering possibilities.
What he did offer was the disconcerting news that no matter what the problem is, possible treatments wouldn’t start until next spring. He left us with the impression he would return later, in better weather, and take a closer look. One of Cyndie’s to-do tasks today is to call the tree company and inquire, because we haven’t heard anything for weeks.
Maybe when he said better weather, he meant next spring.
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Try Imagining
Try imagining that you are daily striving to tightly control the percentage of sugar in your total caloric intake, despite the onslaught of incoming treats at work from a number of generous, well-meaning sources, and yesterday, when you arrived home from work and opened the door to your house, you were met by an overwhelming aroma of fresh-baked goodies that practically lifted you off your feet.
For some reason, as soon as I am home from work, I want to eat something. It is one of the trickier parts of my day, in terms of managing my choices in avoidance of unnecessary sugars. I’m happy to eat anything, as long as it doesn’t take any time to prepare. Crunchy, salty, and sweet tend to be cravings that most strongly nag me.
Yesterday, at my weakest moment, Cyndie was moving fresh-baked cookies off a tray, onto the cooling rack. I don’t think there is any better time to test a cookie than when it is still warm from the oven. I hadn’t even finished setting down things I had carried in the door when I sank my teeth into the irresistible goodness of a cookie that tasted like a cinnamon bun.
Cyndie mentioned that she hadn’t put the icing on yet, which helped to calm some of my angst. Knowing that I was eating less sugar than the cookies would ultimately have helped me justify my choice. See how that works?
Really, try to imagine walking in the door to this:
I wish I could provide a smell-o-vision feature, to give you the full effect.
Next Sunday afternoon we are hosting a “neighborhood cookie social” for folks living around us, most of whom we’ve yet to meet in the three years we’ve been here. Cyndie printed out an invitation and then drove a loop of the immediate roads surrounding us to the west, where we know a handful of folks, including our good friend and trusty farrier, George Walker.
Multiple locations have mailboxes grouped, and she wasn’t sure about which mailbox went with which house, so she just put an invite in every box. Roughly 30, she said. We have no idea how many may show up, and we likely won’t recognize but a few.
Imagine that. It should be fun!
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Didn’t Miss
I was wrong. Turns out, the rain didn’t miss us. It was simply delayed. When it finally moved over us, it arrived with a vengeance.
The precipitation began in the early morning hours yesterday, and thrashed down with significant gusting winds. I was awakened about a half-hour before my alarm by the tempest, allowing me a chance to lay and wonder how the horses were handling the assault.
The nasty weather added unwelcome drama to my commute through the cities in the early darkness, reducing visibility to the point that most decisions become mere guess-work, while my car was shoved to and fro unexpectedly by the extreme gusting wind.
The temperature hovered just above the freezing point, and throughout the day the precipitation oscillated between wet, icy, and flaky.
Cyndie sent me some pictures and reported that the horses were soaking wet, jumpy as heck, and shivering to beat the band when she arrived to offer the morning feed. Poor Hunter was beside himself, looking thoroughly undone and having a tizzy about getting into the barn. When he is cold and wet, the first thing he does upon entering the confined space of his stall is to lay down and roll in the wood shavings we use for bedding.
It makes a scary racket, because he inevitably hits the walls with his feet in his wild gyrating. Cyndie said he successfully got himself covered with wood shavings from head to tail.
By afternoon, the rain gauge had captured 2 inches. As I neared home on my return from work, I began to see water flowing in ditches that are usually dry. Every creek I crossed was spilling out beyond its banks.
Delilah had to traipse along beside the trails in places that were under water.
If we get a quick freeze, I’m afraid Cyndie will need to wear skates when she walks the dog in the days ahead.
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It Missed!
It turned out that my concerns were unwarranted yesterday about even more rain falling on our already saturated grounds. From my repeated checks of the radar all day, it looked like a wall was keeping the surging mass of precipitation from moving north past a certain point. As it reached the southern boundary of our county, it stopped its advance and just seemed to slide past us to the northeast.
This doesn’t mean that we dried out any. On the contrary. The sky remained heavily overcast and the dew point high enough that wetness continued to be the order of the day.
It was a good day to have the warm glow of a fire in our fireplace!
Happily, the lack of actual falling rain was a break for our horses, allowing them to avoid the cold soaking that rain in December involves.
The bleakness of our landscape lingers on. According to forecasts, the next possibility for freezing temperatures comes at the end of this week.
Even if it doesn’t bring a dose of accumulating snow, I will be happy to at least have the wet ground turn frozen, to give us a break from the frustrating mud.
I’m pretty certain that frozen leaves will provide less hazardous footing than the wet leaves over slippery mud which we are currently enduring.
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December Rain
I knew it was coming, but the arrival of more rain today still feels like a bit of a shock. Our land is so, so wet. The ground is not frozen yet, creating a very spring-like mud-saster wherever our horses walk.
We got some rain overnight, but had a momentary break this morning. I had forgotten to put the rain gauge out, after one of the times it actually was cold enough to freeze and I brought the glass tube in to thaw. I don’t know how much fell while we slept.
The unfortunate reality is that, as of this writing, we have much more rain on the way from the south.
We are approaching the middle of December and receiving rainstorms like the middle of summer. Why, it is as if the climate is changing, or something.
I saw the comment recently that we don’t need to save our planet. The planet will still be here long after the human race has gone extinct. We need to be thinking about saving ourselves!
Maybe I should be building a boat.
At least the herd is showing enough sense to seek the high ground this morning. The areas where we have covered the dirt with lime screenings have compacted enough now that they are performing well as intended. It gives the horses a chance to get out of the mud for a time.
It is impressive, and sometimes scary, how far down a hoof will sink in the mud, given the approx 1000 lbs. of horse-force pushing down.
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Fires Return
Our chimney is fixed! What joy! But I don’t see how Santa is ever going to fit down it now.
It was back in the middle of October when we had our fireplace and chimney inspected, which I wrote about at the time in a post titled, “Important Inspection.”
They discovered evidence of there having been a chimney fire sometime in the past, which resulted in cracking of the original clay tiles lining the chimney.
Never fear, that company just so happens to also install chimney liners, for a (not so) small fee. At least they provide clear photographic evidence of the areas of concern, which our insurance company accepted without hesitation. Our repairs were covered in full, after we pay the (not so small) deductible amount on our policy.
This project benefited from the wonderful luck of the original chimney dimensions being large enough to make it one of the easiest installations possible, according to the guys.
They installed sections of stainless steel tubing inside the old clay tiles from the top of the chimney and didn’t need to break out any of the existing structure to complete the job.
A cement rated for high temperature is also used around the outside of the tube. Everything gets sealed and then checked for leaks. When they finished our installation, one of the guys burned some paper in the fireplace to verify the draft was good, and that was that.
It was instantly available for use. That meant I needed to haul some wood!
Cyndie and I filled the rack on the deck with one fully-stacked row of split logs from the wood shed. I had mixed emotions about the excitement of finally making use of wood that has been drying for a full year, and comical distress over seeing the stores in the wood shed decline at such a rapid rate.
I also found myself surprised over how moving it felt to have a fire in the fireplace once again. It has been almost 2 months since we learned of the problem, and at the time of year when we especially cherish the return of this cozy enhancement.
It refocuses the energy center on our main floor back to the special space that functions as our “living room,” with the couch providing a vantage point that takes in the fireplace centerpiece, as well as the doors and windows on either side providing views of the great outdoors beyond.
It doesn’t hurt that we just so happen to be undergoing a magical transformation into a Christmas wonderland this weekend, as a result of Cyndie’s never-ending visionary efforts.
I think the addition of last night’s fire provided her with just the right spark as a bonus.
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Relative Something 