Archive for January 2016
Losing Effort
I imagine that watching Minnesota Vikings football is a little like having bought a ticket to the lottery, but I can’t say for sure, because I don’t buy lottery tickets. I would guess that a lottery ticket provides inspiration to dream of becoming independently wealthy. A Vikings fan can only hope for the possibility their team won’t come up short of a necessary victory.
I have suffered the psychological abuse of being a Vikings fan my entire life. It’s been hard, because the franchise has often fielded great teams of incredible athletes. When I was a kid, the team was respected by fans and foes for having a dominating defense. The Minnesota Vikings were good teams and won enough games to earn their way to 4 Superbowls, from which they came away losers, all 4 times.
It’s the repeated dashing of hopes that begins to feel like some kind of a mental endurance test.
Yesterday’s game was one of the worst kind. Leading for most of the playoff game, then falling behind late, and finally achieving a position on the field where they had a chance to win as time runs out. The field goal attempt was wide left. Game over.
Season over.
Hopes dashed.
I wonder what I would do with a billion dollar lottery win.
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Many Snows
It is said that there are many words for snow in the Inuit languages. I think we currently have snow that could be described by most of them.
It is below zero in our spot of the world this morning. Depending on the source of the data, anywhere from -15 to -5° (F). My Weatherbug app is indicating -15° at the Ellsworth Middle School, while the Weather Channel online site shows Beldenville at -8°. The thermometer that is attached to the outside of our bathroom window shows a relative balmy -5°.
The key ingredient with all of those readings is that we are enjoying an absolutely calm air at the moment. With no wind-chill to factor in, personal radiated warmth allows easy tolerance of these cold temperatures.
One of the English words for our snow this morning is “squeaky.” There will be no sneaking up on anyone outdoors today. I will admit to an intention to stay indoors for the most part, to watch a television broadcast of the Minnesota Vikings NFL team engage in a battle against a foe from Seattle in the opening round of playoffs. Skol, Vikings!
The snowfall we enjoyed last week, transformed our paltry winter landscape into a place of dreams. It made a mess of my commute and forced me to get the plow reattached to the ATV, but days like these are when Wintervale Ranch lives up to the name.
I asked Cyndie to take pictures for me.
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The temperatures were so warm when the precipitation started to fall, the ground was melting snow from beneath. Yesterday, despite the cold air that had arrived, my shoveling of areas covered by the full blanket of new snow revealed, to my surprise, ground that was still wet.
We have a wide combination of light powder snow on top, wind-blown drifting snow in places, icy snow that was wet and is now frozen, crusty snow that formed a layer between precipitation events, solid blocks created by plowing, roughly packed snow where footsteps disturbed the first layers, and this morning, squeaky snow.
It is absolutely beautiful.
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Taking Action
After getting home from the day-job yesterday, I went right to work on the ranch-job. This time of year, I don’t get much time at home that isn’t dark, and I wanted to clear snow while I could see well and get it done before temperatures head for the deep freeze.
Light snow fell on and off for most of the day and the thermometer revealed a 39° (F) reading as the high. It made for some sticky-snow plowing. On the drive home, anywhere that had been plowed had pretty much melted clear of snow and the roads were just wet. Our driveway had a thick accumulation covering it.
First things first. I needed to repair the broken cable from the Grizzly winch that lifts the plow blade. I had held off on the fix because I was intending to buy new cable. Searching online I discovered the existence of a short cable made to take the abuse of the constant up and down that occurs to lift the blade, and that they are available not just as metal, but fiberglass, too.
I like the thought of flexible fiber, but then my mind pictured the rollers on my well-used winch setup. The frequent broken strands on the abused cable have scuffed up the rollers a bit and they are getting rusty. I want new rollers if I’m going to get new cable and I haven’t had time to look into what that will take. I don’t know if I can even get the existing ones off without a fight.
Remember how much I struggled to remove the broken bolt on the hitch in back?
So, the first order of business was to head down to the barn and remove the hook with the dangling fragment of cable still hanging on the plow blade. On my way past the shop, I grabbed the battery charger to hook up to the truck that was sitting in the middle of space needing to be plowed.
I lucked out. My plan worked pretty much as I intended. I got the truck battery charging and then wrestled the blade out the narrow front door of the barn. It fought me a little bit when it came time to lay in the snow and put pins through precisely sized holes of the plow frame and the under carriage of the ATV, but I had a few extra curse words that hadn’t been used yet, so things balanced out.
It was definitely snowman snow, but I just rolled with it as it rolled off the blade in giant chunks. It was well after dark when I finished, but I got enough done that I am comfortable that we are ready for everything to freeze solid as it sits.
I was intent on making sure I was clearing the snow far enough beyond the edges to leave me space for the rest of the winter of plowing. Setting the edges at the beginning is the most important because it will freeze and form the solid boundary for the rest of the season.
I’m satisfied I took appropriate action and achieved that goal. The driveway is clean, the truck started for me and is now parked where I want it by the shop garage and everything looks like a perfect winter wonderland.
Bring on the Arctic cold blast.
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Four Tattletales
Our lovely dog, Delilah, took advantage of Cyndie’s decision to allow some time off leash in the afternoon yesterday, while she shoveled away the accumulation of Wednesday night’s snow. After a couple of successes, in which Delilah returned to Cyndie when called, there came the great escape once again.
Out of sight in a blink.
Cyndie hollered and whistled for Delilah. She walked through the barn and found the horses in the paddock, looking at her while she made the ruckus. They’d witnessed this routine enough times before that they knew what was going on. Cyndie decided to drive the roads in search of our wandering canine. She hiked up to the house to get the truck keys, but was stymied by a dead battery.
That’s an ongoing occasional drama for another time.
She went back up to the house to get her car to widen her search. Down the road, when she spotted a flock of turkeys luxuriating in a field, she knew she was in the wrong spot. No dog in that vicinity.
As she returned to our place and pulled into the driveway, she spotted all four horses, now in the hay-field, lined up and facing one specific direction. They didn’t even turn to look at her, as is their usual behavior, but rather, maintained their intense stare in that single direction. They were clearly signaling a message for Cyndie, compelling her to look at what they were seeing. She turned her head to follow their gaze and immediately spotted the bright orange flash of Delilah’s vest across the street, in the neighbor’s field, past the snowmobile trail leading into the woods.
Cyndie described how it was the distinct posture of each of the horses which made the message so clear. They were not lolling around aimlessly, or relaxed in the stance of a nap, but instead were straight and tall, flexed as if on a specific mission. She would totally have missed that Delilah was in that direction, had it not been for their help.
The horses had totally ratted out our dog on the lam.
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Frost Heaving
I know I have lamented how wet things were here during autumn, and you’d think I’d be over it now that winter has finally made itself known in full, but I must admit to still having a gripe over all the water.
Cyndie made a run to the feed store in the truck to pick up bags of horse food and wood shavings yesterday before the next predicted snowfall event arrived. After offloading some things at the house, she was going to drive down to the barn to unload the bags of feed and shavings, and asked me if she should park the truck inside the barn since it was going to snow.
I recognized her question as a way to enlist me to move the snowplow blade that is on the ground just inside the big sliding doors of the barn.
I volunteered. “Sure, you can park in the barn. I’ll go down and move the plow out of the way.”
Except she couldn’t. I didn’t bother moving the plow because I couldn’t open the big doors. The saturated ground had heaved when it froze and was pushing the doors up off their rollers and had wedged them tight.
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Cyndie had already worked to scrape the ground beneath the small door earlier in the day so she could get it open.
The big doors aren’t going anywhere for a while.
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Greatest Discovery
As I was driving home from work yesterday, I became aware of an absence of a gloomy pall which had been working its way over me for a couple of days prior. Even though few circumstances actually improved, my mental state had.
That is a testament to the greatest discovery I ever made. Many years ago, I identified my depression. Becoming aware of my depression allowed me to take action toward treating it. Treating my depression has led to every improvement in health I have achieved since.
Through daily adherence to my personal “program” of thoughts and actions that specifically counteract my depressive tendencies, I now manage my mental health without prescription medication or professional psychological support. I originally used both to find my way out of the darkness.
I still find myself surprised when the things I’ve learned to do, like catching my negative self-talk and ending it, or cultivating love for others and projecting it, produce such tangible results.
It is well-known, and usually rather obvious, that people’s energies are contagious. Individuals have widely varying levels of tendencies to be an influencer or the influenced.
If you haven’t seen the viral video by Shea Glover, People react to being called beautiful, check it out to see how quickly, and mostly involuntarily, people react to a positive verbal message. Imagine if we sent that same message to everyone, nonverbally from our hearts.
Be the influencer. Send love.
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Not Static
Nothing is as static as my mind tends to imagine it to be. The constant changes and endless activity I have witnessed on our property in the past 3 years are convincing me that my general impression of the world has been a gross oversimplification of reality.
I think I’ve already written about my amazement over how relatively fluid the “solid ground” actually is. I know that farmers who need to pick rocks out of their tilled fields year after year are well aware of this ‘fluidity.’
Yesterday, a day that was about as plain as an uneventful winter day can be, I was trudging up one of my shortcut paths through the trees between our barn and the house when I suddenly became aware of all the debris collecting on the snow covering the ground.
It is a blaring announcement about how much activity is actually occurring in the seemingly static days that have followed last week’s snow storm. I’m guessing that squirrels are responsible for much of the shrapnel that has fallen from the trees, but I expect there are plenty of other less visible actors in the constant change taking place.
I need only look to the manure pile to witness evidence of the microscopic players at work in a feat of perpetual transition. Even though growing things all appear to be in a winter state of dead or dormant, the manure pile continues to cook at 140° F. There is an amazing amount of activity going on in the center of that pile.
I used to think there were two states of a mouse trap: tripped, or not. Now I know there is a third one. It is called, gone. I have lost too many mouse traps to count. Before we went out of town last Thursday, I added new peanut butter bait to the two traps in the garage. It had been too many days in a row without any evidence of activity, and I knew better. The mice had definitely lost interest in the traps.
The tally upon our return was, one trap with a mouse in it, and one trap gone. I don’t know if a mouse got caught in the trap and something else hauled it off somewhere, or the trap snapped on a mouse that could still run away, dragging the trap with it.
My response to all this is that I am not going to devise any single solution to situations that arise. I will endeavor to change the way I deal with things just as often as the challenges morph in new and different ways.
It’s not any spectacular new innovation. I’d say it’s pretty much how things have been throughout time. I’m just coming to a realization that I can choose to frame my perspective differently.
You could say I am planning to observe and respond to situations with more fluidity.
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Favorite Photos
Holy cow, this year is flying by. It’s the 3rd day of January already! We are home again, and I’m happy to report that Delilah did great on the 4-hour drive from Grand Rapids, Minnesota to Beldenville, Wisconsin.
Today, I hope to do as little as possible in the way of productive endeavors, unless they involve power-lounging and idling away the time with trivial pursuits (which have their own way of feeling productive sometimes). I will mentally prepare for the return to the week of work that follows the New Year celebrations. Everything that was being held in suspended animation during the holidays will be released for a return to the regular grind.
Our next paid holiday doesn’t arrive for 5-months! At least the daylight hours will gradually be getting longer during that otherwise ominously staid period of time.
On that cheery note, I will endeavor to bring some pleasure to these proceedings with a sampling of a few of my favorite photos to emerge from our weekend visit with Barb and Mike.
The first two were taken by Barb when the lake was just in the process of freezing, and she generously shared them with me. The close-up shot is right out of my bag of tricks, so of course I love it the most. I asked her how she got it to be black and white, and Barb replied, “It’s not.” I love that it looks like there is no color in the captured image.
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This next one is mine. I took a picture of the water flowing beneath a dam, wanting to capture the water droplets on the edge of the forming ice. After zooming in, I was surprised to find the lines that look like a drawn-in animation. A moment after that, the whole thing took on a look of being more a painting than a photo. I’m really happy with it.
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Wonderful Adventures
We enjoyed a fabulous day of wonderful adventures on the first day of 2016 up in the woods of northern Minnesota with our friends Barb and Mike. I captured some evidence.
We went for a walk in the woods of their nearby property…
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We went for a walk on their lake. It is a very, very deep water lake, and only recently froze over. We mostly stayed close to the shore. The ice thickness was reported as being just enough to support foot traffic, but nothing beyond that yet.
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I wore my festive hat that the Morales family bought for me when they visited us at Wintervale a couple of Christmases ago. Perfect!
We topped off the incredible day with a visit to a neighboring property where I experienced two amazing firsts. This family hosts an annual New Year celebration with their own custom fireworks show. I have never stood that close to a show that was that big and that spectacular. I’m happy to report, we all survived unscathed. Did I mention it was spectacular?
Too bad my hasty attempt at capturing one of the explosions with my pocket camera didn’t do it the justice it deserves.
The other first for me was witnessing this brilliant design for burning a one log fire in a vertical position. What amazed me was that I hadn’t come across this before in my 56 years of existence. I want to make some!
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Relative Something 