Archive for October 2019
All Hands
It’s that season when the fields come alive with humans and machines. A call must go out for all hands and able bodies for harvesting before the weather messes things up significantly. On my way home on Tuesday I came upon a batch of pickup trucks and workers busy in the fields around the corner from our driveway.
They were gobbling up soybeans and filling the big truck and trailer. It always seems odd to see such a big rig driven into the dirt fields. I don’t understand how they avoid getting stuck.
These fields are so devoid of attention all summer long, it’s startling to suddenly see them become such a hub of activity.
Our house experiences a burst of activity of its own when the soybeans fields are cut down. Suddenly our back doors become the new gathering place for Asian beetles.
The bugs were enjoying the warm sunshine around the backside of our house around the doors to the deck. I know that because I was back there, too.
Cyndie and I did a little more work replacing boards on the deck while the weather was still accommodating.
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We were all hands on deck. Hah!
Now we hunker down for a few days of expected rain and even the first falling snow of the season. The deck project goes on hold until the next dry day shows up. Our bodies will be happy to have a break. I have done so much kneeling lately, I feel like a little kid on the floor playing with my Matchbox car collection.
Thank goodness I’m noticing my knees because that means my back hasn’t been grabbing attention. Knock on deck boards (wood) that my lower back has not flared up from all the leaning over for long periods of time.
What? Me superstitious?
Sending love to my lower back…
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Happy
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would you do me a favor
and loan me that smile
for as long as I can remember it
deep into the darkness
of hours and days
away from the laughter
that lights up your eyes
when we are happy
and in love
stupendously in love
but more importantly just
incredibly
happy
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Mixed Up
Yesterday afternoon we had plenty of sunshine that enabled me to get out and mow some grass, not because I wanted to, but because it needed to be cut so bad I didn’t dare wait for another chance. Our grass had grown so much since the last time I mowed, it looked like a June afternoon around here on October 7th.
On top of that, the recent pounding of rain we have been receiving has our property as wet as a spring day. It was rather disorienting to need to mow around certain areas where there was standing water. That is something that used to happen at the beginning of the mowing season. In my lifetime of living in this region, October was not a month where mowing thick grass needed to happen.
This is not the climate of my youth.
Meanwhile, this June-type of lawn growth is days away from meeting up with its first dose of snow for the coming season.
It’s a mixed-up world.
Someone posted in our neighborhood app asking people to be on the lookout for a pink-faced calf that ran off into the woods. I’m not sure if the pink face was natural or the result of some special effects. The calf had been tied in the yard for a “cownicorn” birthday party.
The drama didn’t last long, because they found the calf just a short time later. It may not be all that mixed up for this rural community, but it was unusual enough to contribute more strangeness to the already crazy thick growing grass in October.
I accept that nothing is actually static, so unusual occurrences are always unfolding, regardless of how we perceive and frame our world. It inspires me to strive for resilience in the face of whatever new mix-ups might be around the next corner.
It’s hard to imagine what to expect, other than the obvious fact something new will show up as being totally mixed up.
Unless it doesn’t. But then, would that just seem mixed up, too?
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More Boards
Are you sick of reading about our deck yet? I’m afraid this do-it-yourself project isn’t one we can conquer quickly, so the subject drags on. Yesterday’s weather allowed us to get back out there and drive a few more screws, but working in short stints like this will result in the end achievement coming in weeks instead of days.
Today I’m back commuting to the day-job, so decking is on hold for a while.
Yesterday, Cyndie and I ran into a few hiccups that kept our progress from soaring ahead into brag-worthy results, but we are both perfectly satisfied with what we accomplished in the time we were able to be out there.
On the plus side, the battery charger that seemed like it wasn’t working on Friday lit up yesterday with a perfect flashing green LED. I don’t know what made the difference, but my drill driver was very happy to have two chargers feeding its batteries again.
The biggest hassle was losing one of the three spacer boards we had been using. It suddenly disappeared and despite searching for too long, there was no sign of it anywhere. I finally gave in and we walked to the shop garage to hunt for another spacer.
Fifteen minutes later, after dropping yet another spacer under the deck, Cyndie found the first one we had lost was hung up down there behind a joist.
At least that made sense for where it had disappeared to because I was starting to worry I had absentmindedly set it down somewhere when I stepped inside the house or thrown it down on the pile of old rotten boards without realizing it.
I have forgotten enough things lately that this seemed like it could too easily have been another lapse by my feeble mind.
Since that wasn’t the case, I’m giving myself a clean slate and ready to assume my memory is sound.
My body, on the other hand, will be happy to have a break from the weekend of hard labor. Now it’s back to trying to stay alert on the long commutes to and from work for a few days.
Instead of focusing on more boards, I will be managing becoming more bored with the hours of driving.
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Failure Averse
It was a radio exposé about a successful yogurt entreprise. I wasn’t really listening to it, but the interview droned on and on as I wandered around the house doing a variety of other things. I noticed the initial comments about how difficult the early days of the business were and figured it was just a typical worst-to-first tale that one would expect to hear on the radio or television.
When I came by the kitchen again later, I was surprised they were even still talking to this same guy, but then I realized they were still drilling through the worst years before the big victory in the end. Not having listened closely, I didn’t grasp how he was even still in business at that point where he was describing the level of debt that had amassed and scope of his scrounging for cash to get by each successive day.
That’s when it struck me. When Cyndie and I dipped our toes in the world of starting a business venture, we weren’t willing to go into debt to see if it was possible to eventually come up with a financially sustainable operation in the end.
It seems that most stories of wild success include a fair amount of previous failures that came first. I expect there are more tales of failure in the world than there are ultimate successes, but it occurred to me that energy spent avoiding failure probably inhibits overall outcomes.
Obviously, it doesn’t make sense that one should then plan to fail, but I think it does point to the importance of willingness to dance with increasing levels of risk and endure the challenges associated with it, long enough to eventually reach the dreams envisioned.
In our case, neither of us are comfortable with shaky finances. We signed documents of commitment to pay our mortgage every month, and we hold it a priority to be able to do that.
We have accomplished that financial stability throughout our lives thus far, but with that as our primary priority, there wasn’t much additional risk-space available for two non-celebrities launching a new-age horse assisted health and wellness learning venture an hour out of town to have much of a chance.
Honestly, I don’t know how people like the yogurt guy on the radio pull off their rags to riches accomplishments, but I’m glad they do. I’m too failure averse.
I wish I would have listened close enough to find out the name of his company. I’d like to go buy some of his yogurt as a hat-tip to his feat.
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Good Start
Blessed with a day between drenching rains, yesterday we made great headway on the deck resurfacing project. Mike arrived about the same time daylight did and Cyndie primed our energies with a grand breakfast feast in preparation for the long day of labor ahead. Setting the first board required immediate customization, which is a part of the project I would have struggled to accomplish without Mike’s wisdom and experience.
After solving that challenge, the work settled into a board-placing routine that wasn’t particularly complicated but tended to eat up bigger chunks of time just doing than it seems it should.
Along the way, there were pauses to re-measure spacing and then tweaking the board gaps. Even simple board selection adds minutes, pondering how to minimize waste while selecting around imperfections in the lumber.
Eventually, we would reach a railing post and be faced with doing some customized cuts to enclose the obstruction. For the post below, Mike engineered two pieces that required multiple cuts which resulted in a pretty slick looking continued flow.
The thinking involved to plot where seams fall gets a little mind-boggling for me, but Mike helped to achieve a repeating pattern that I really like.
By lunch we had covered the bottom level, which was honestly my main goal, knowing in advance that progress most likely would be hampered by something. Nothing I have ever worked on goes so smoothly that I get more done than expected.
Most important for me was proving the process. I thought I would be able to do this in place of hiring professionals, but I was a little wary about the unknowns like detailing around the railing, mastering the seams and spacing, and even where to start, and how to finish the last board.
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We’ve got boards cut to length and positioned, but not all of them screwed down yet. By the end of the day, we probably were just under halfway finished with the resurfacing. There is a lot of lumber yet to replace, but the number of complicated decisions left to be addressed should be less.
If we ever get another dry weather day, maybe I can work more on the project.
Actually, today’s rain has me wondering if we shouldn’t have skipped the deck project and focused on building a boat that could hold us and our pets instead. I’m worried our house might just float away if it keeps up like this, and we live on top of a hill!
Apparently, the atmosphere holds more moisture when the planet warms and is able to dump more precipitation as a result.
I wonder if we have any circumstantial evidence to back that up.
I wish I could remember where we put our PFDs.
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Saving Thousands
If money was no object for us, I would have spent last night reclining in my easy chair with my feet up doing something pleasant, like napping. Instead, we are saving thousands of dollars by doing the work of replacing the rotting surface boards of our deck ourselves, along with the priceless assistance of our precious friend, Mike Wilkus.
That meant Cyndie and I were both out on the deck after I got home from work yesterday, manically striving to prepare as much as possible for today’s plan of installing the new boards.
We are going to keep the railing, so Cyndie has been sanding and wire brushing that wood to remove the lichen that has grown on much of it.
I worked to remove more of the old surface boards, prying up the original ones that were nailed and pulling screws from previous replacement planks.
It is one of those projects that shouldn’t be difficult but always includes unexpected challenges that suddenly bog down progress and increase frustration. Often, it has been a hidden screw that I missed, or simply one where the head is stripped and won’t spin out.
My hole-saw bit has been working wonderfully as a solution to free the old boards and leave problem screws behind to be spun out with a vice grip plier.
Most of the boards are coming up with ease, so I am growing more confident that the whole project is in reach of being as straightforward as we hoped. I’m thinking the bulk of work today will involve hauling new boards to be cut to length and then screwing them down to the joists.
All the while, I’ll be thinking about how much money we are saving by not contracting this out to any of those high bidders who recently quoted the job.
Our labor will be worth thousands.
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Wettest Wetness
It’s official. With the end of September earlier this week came the close of what Hydrologists consider the 12-month “water year” according to my favorite weather blog, Updraft. Beginning October 1, 2018, and running to the end of September 30, 2019, we endured the wettest water year on record.
The start of the 2019-2020 water year is not wasting any time in preparing to make a run at challenging that record. Water is actually bubbling up out of the soil in some places on our land where the pressure of groundwater uphill from us is pushing it to the surface, allowing it to then flow away down our drainage ditch to ever lower elevations.
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Tuesday night, after closing the chicken door upon returning from our class in River Falls, I stopped at one of our two rain gauges. There were 2.5 inches collected, but I wasn’t certain how many days that represented. I dumped it to start fresh but forgot to mention this to Cyndie.
Yesterday, she struggled to reconcile the low collection in the gauge by the house, wondering if it might be leaking or something.
Oops. My bad.
The gauge on a fence post down by the labyrinth made a little more sense with its 2.5-inch amount. It is common to see some disparity between the two, but both easily depict whether we are receiving small or large amounts of precipitation in random blocks of collection time.
Suffice it to say, our land is unbelievably wet right now. Soggy pretty much describes everything.
I think we are gonna need a bigger boat.
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Learning More
Last night we attended a community education class in River Falls on the topic of planning when to initiate receiving Social Security payments. As you might imagine, it was rich with fascinating detail and enticing facts. Yawn.
One of the highlights of the night was the series of images used for the presentation, collected from years of marketing literature received by the instructor for his financial planning business. He pointed out the universal themes on marketing materials from a wide array of retirement industry service providers shows happy, swooning gray-haired couples on beaches wearing light-colored linen clothes.
He seemed to have amassed an endless supply of these images and has devised a keen way of getting additional use out of the photos.
One aspect of importance he conveyed was the total amount of money ultimately available if certain choices are made. Make a different choice, you end up getting less money in the end.
So what? That parameter of maximizing the total dollars collected over time does not hold much allure for me.
If by the end of 25-years, when I’m in my mid-to-late 80s, whether my total amount received ends up plus or minus $20K seems an illogical parameter on which to prioritize. More important to me is whether I will have enough income month to month to cover my expenses.
Especially when the length of time I will be collecting is not a given. Why set a goal to collect the most money possible by the time I reach 85-years when the timing of my demise is not guaranteeable?
I tend to spend within my means, so if I have less money, I spend less.
All this planning would sure be a lot easier if I knew what my medical expenses will be as I age. Something tells me the discs in my lower back won’t become less of an issue in my eighties.
When we walked out to the parking lot of the high school in the dark after the session, there weren’t many cars remaining. A woman in front of us climbed into the only car parked in the front row. That created a problem for us, because we had parked in the front row. Where was Cyndie’s car? It made no sense.
I walked closer to read the license plate on the car despite the headlights shining in my eyes and recognized them as Cyndie’s. About the same time, the woman was discovering the car she was in didn’t look anything like hers.
Somehow, though Cyndie claims she didn’t do anything, as we approached, our lights came on and the woman in front of us assumed it was her car responding to her fob, so she climbed into Cyndie’s Honda. The woman’s Subaru was out of view in the adjacent spot beyond ours, in the second row.
We all had a good laugh over the confusion.
This kind of thing happens when aging minds are preoccupied with planning for our eventual financial scenarios.
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Relative Something 