Archive for June 2020
Coping Skills
It’s getting hard to miss the memes questioning what the deal is with 2020 so far. There is one showing the frame for a couple of swings installed next to a brick wall. Yeah, it kinda feels like that. I guess with a global pandemic for a backdrop, any other situation which arises can feel like a slap in the face. The clear video of a white police officer slowly and arrogantly suffocating a black man was a serious gut punch with reverberations riling up centuries of prejudicial inequalities.
It’s getting hard to cope.
I am not surprised to have read somewhere of a trend toward moving from inner cities to the suburbs. I am truly grateful and totally aware of the precious benefit we enjoy in having acres of green space where we can stroll to breathe in the calming balm of all that nature offers.
There was a hint of a break in the cloud cover yesterday that teased of blue sky on the way but in classic 2020 fashion, it disappointed. The sunlight never broke through a gauze of dirty white that mysteriously found a way to hang around.
Our endurance is being tested. I see it as a challenge to how we frame our perceptions. There is no beginning or end when it comes to the span of time. There won’t be a single day which can be measured as the end of the coronavirus pandemic, just as there isn’t an identifiable moment when it began. Same thing for racial prejudice.
We are on a continuum. Life is a big, long ride. Figure out a way to cope for the long haul.
I suggest we mind our manners, take care of ourselves first before helping others, but by all means, seek to help others. Maybe release our urge to so vehemently control outcomes and discover a deeper awareness of what unconscious fears are actually coloring our perceptions.
Put a little extra effort into loving ourselves and in turn, nurturing greater love for others and the world we all share.
What a lovely way to cope with the challenges of life: coping by loving.
Group hug! [after the pandemic, I mean.]
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Coop Sprucing
Yesterday, I finally got around to attaching the summer window awnings on the coop. During the winter we install plexiglass panels over the hardware mesh openings, but in the summer it’s wide open to the weather. For a little protection from wind-blown rain, I add some window-well covers.
Last year, one of the plastic covers was bashed full of holes by a hail storm. Luckily, I had a spare.
While I was tending to the coop, I also added some cross-beams to the chicken ramp because Cyndie felt the chickens needed better footing going up and down.
The Buff Orpington that had been inside laying an egg when I first showed up to work, came out to test the ramp after all the drilling and hammering stopped.
Initially, she seemed hesitant about even coming all the way out the door, but eventually scampered down the ramp without delay. I think she likes it.
After Cyndie came in from tucking the hens in and shutting the chicken door later in the evening, I asked her if she noticed the ramp improvements.
“Nope.”
“Well, did you see the window covers?”
“Nope.”
She had been at her parent’s house while I was sprucing up the coop and I hadn’t mentioned anything about it after she got home.
I guess this demonstrates the changes weren’t overly ostentatious, since she didn’t even notice a thing.
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Teeth Marks
Who’s been chewing on our bin? We keep chicken food in a metal garbage can, but Cyndie likes to provide additional scratch grains and dried mealworms that are stored in the plastic bin shown above.
Last weekend we noticed some teeth marks along the edge of the lid. Yesterday afternoon I discovered the tenacious chewer has gotten to the second level.
I suspect it might either be the return of a certain woodchuck that Cyndie and Delilah chased out of the hay shed a couple of days ago or the frequently sighted raccoons, based on the burrowed access hole into the barn that has been dug out several times. I’ve filled it back in twice already, but this time, after I filled and packed the hole, I peed on it for good measure. I want this varmint to know who he/she is messin’ with.
If it is dug out again by this morning, I’m setting the trap.
I don’t know what I’ll do if I trap whoever it is, but will cross that bridge if/when I come to it.
Pests can be such pests.
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Just Clinging
We have arrived at the week with the earliest sunrise in our location and the weather is at its most wonderful summer-est. Our doors and windows are open and the ceiling fans are turning, yet the warmth hovers around the edge of too much. Tank tops and loose shorts, bare feet and a tall glass of ice water put things right.
The cut hay in our fields was raked and round-baled on the same afternoon yesterday. If you look close, Cyndie captured a lone deer crossing the image view as the field became draped in the shadow that was replacing the disappearing sunlight.
For as much as we are forbidden to wrap our arms around our fellow friends and family, we are striving to wrap the summer up in a grandiose hug of epic proportions. Despite the chaos of a political circus, a global pandemic continuing its invisible spread, and citizens bellowing for justice against centuries of systemic racism against indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the entire spectrum of non-white human beings, I am just clinging to the precious moment of a few glorious quintessential summer days for their faint distraction of nature at its finest.
We are doing so without a rambunctious picnic of music and food and a hundred of our favorite people. I am doing so without my annual week of biking and camping somewhere around Minnesota with hundreds of friends and brilliant like-minded adventurers. We are doing so without concerts enjoyed among thousands of similar music-loving fans or sports competitions with hoards of supporters cheering on the efforts of athletes at every level of skill.
There will be no county fairs and ultimately, no Minnesota State Fair. Graduations have already been morphed into sometimes blessedly shorter shadows of the usual pomp and circumstance, and weddings and funerals constrained to unrecognizable whispers of the emotional extravagance they deserve.
Navigating the days that turn to weeks and then months of the COVID-19 pandemic is dragging us all into a marathon of paying heed to the best-practice precautions of constraining the spread to manageable levels despite our preference that it just be a short duration fast-walk competition among friends.
My dentist’s office called and left a message that they are now accepting cleaning and checkup appointments scheduled for the fall. My rather feeble home plaque-scraping exercise since my appointment in March was canceled is now going to need to suffice until autumn. Thank goodness I won’t need to waste a beautiful summer afternoon splayed back in the reclined chair getting my teeth cleaned and inspected.
The best medicine I have right now for the pandemonium of current events is the natural summer surroundings of our little paradise. I love it. We love it.
It helps fuel our ability to nurture and grow that love for beaming out into the great big world.
Here is Wintervale LOVE to all who are willing and able to receive it… <muwah>
Cling to that.
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Music Memory
As a latter-baby-boom fan of record albums, I have a number of milestone music memories from my coming-of-age years moving between middle school to high school in the 1970s. Admittedly, having four older siblings as in-home influencers contributed greatly to my exposure to music that was older than my years. The burgeoning rock scene of the Woodstock era was a little beyond my 10-year-old self, but the allure of the music was well-established by the time I reached my mid-teens.
Cyndie and I were recently gifted with access to Apple Music by our kids. The welcome message from Apple points out my song collection is now 60-million strong. This is a gift the kids will have a very difficult time surpassing in the future. Maybe a fiber-optic line of unlimited data access to our home in the rural countryside could top this, but that’s pretty far beyond the ability of individuals to achieve.
As it is, we are able to sip new downloads through a tiny straw on our current data plan.
However, my connection at work offers an alternate avenue for adding songs to the library on my phone. Yesterday, I downloaded the America album, “Holiday.” That record was released on my 15th birthday at a time when my interest in their acoustic guitar sounds and vocal harmonies was very strong.
It was to be my time. New music that was current to my adolescence. However, reality didn’t quite match my expectations. The band was evolving and I was disappointed.
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I liked the way they looked on their first album. I am embarrassingly influenced by album cover art. (Duly noting the incredible insensitivity of the somber indigenous tribesmen behind the gleeful white trio under the dual-meaning “America.”) The old-timey photo on “Holiday” didn’t appeal to me one bit.
The new album had less strumming acoustic guitars and more theatrical clarinet.
I tried to like “Holiday.” There were a couple of songs that wowed me, but the majority didn’t, despite listening to it over and over again. When I moved from LPs to CDs, “Holiday” didn’t get replaced. I haven’t heard most of these songs in 40-some years. Now, with the convenience of digital access, I get to revisit my youth.
Listening to the album again triggered a lot of memories. Riding in the back of a station wagon packed with teens and someone turning up the radio for the song, “Tin Man” and shooshing everyone because “John’s song” was on.
But, I wanted “Horse with No Name” and “Riverside” not “Sister Golden Hair” and “Muskrat Love.”
Luckily, at the time, I also had “461 Ocean Boulevard,” the return of Eric Clapton to recording after recovering from a 3-year addiction to heroin.
I’m looking forward to mining more lost gems and their associated memories of my youth among the other 60-million songs that hopefully include a wide variety from the 70s.
Thank you, Elysa and Julian! This was a brilliant choice for a gift for us both.
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Focus Shift
I started the day yesterday with our Stihl power trimmer working primarily along the hay-field fence line out by the road. With the field freshly cut, the strip of tall grass along the fence stood out in obvious need of attention. It looks so nice when that is cleaned up.
After the first tank of gas was used up, I walked back to the shop to stretch my legs out and refill the tank. While there, I took a little break to answer nature’s call at the base of a pine tree and noticed a vine growing up from deep inside the tangle of branches. Thinking I should tend to the situation in the moment instead of waiting until it was out of sight/out of mind, I fetched a saw from the shop and braved the thick web of poking limbs, slithering into the shadow world beneath the tree.
From that vantage point, I discovered there were many more than just the one obvious vine growing into the heights. As I worked my way around the circumference of that tree, I came to another right beside it with even more unwelcome intruders climbing up its branches.
After the second tree, I moved on to a third, and a fourth, soon recognizing that this side project could consume the rest of my day if I let it.
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The remaining trees can wait. I went back to trimming the tall grass along the edges of the hay-field.
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This Happened
In the realm of pictures being worth a thousand words, I can provide two pictures that clearly depict two things that happened yesterday afternoon.
We had a couple of visitors. One welcome, the other, not so much.
The hay fields were cut and a couple of young raccoons were out and about on a daytime explore that brought them into close proximity to Cyndie and her dog down by the labyrinth.
All sorts of activity around us in the midst of sheltering in place from rising numbers of cases of COVID-19 being reported.
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Toppled Over
Back in April, I wrote about the derelict birdhouse properties bespoiling our otherwise stellar reputation for well-kept homes in the area. A hole in one roof and siding falling off another. Well, before they even got around to fixing that sagging siding, the whole foundation gave out. This is how we found the situation after sunrise this morning:
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Some raccoon probably got curious about what might be residing inside that aging bird home and tried climbing up to take a peek.
That’s what they get for building on an unsound foundation.
Luckily, it appears there was no one home at the time of the toppling.
Maybe someone should consider putting their birdhouse on this foundation:
It’s about twenty-five feet tall.
After clearing out small trees beneath two of our big oaks near the house, the trunk of a similar oak that had snapped off in a storm last year became clearly visible.
It’ll be a while before what’s left of that tree tips over and falls to the ground. Unfortunately, it’s beyond my reach to mount anything on top of it. The winged creatures are on their own to build a nest up there if they so choose.
We’ll find a new place for our little birdhouse catering to cavity-nesting birds that prefer heights I can actually achieve.
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Different Boats
My afternoon commutes home from work usually include a bit of the day’s news on the radio and the repetition of politics, pandemic, and protests of the last few weeks feel like they’re on an endless loop. Rinse and repeat.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a full day, or maybe two, when a certain person didn’t publish a single peep on his Twitter account?
Yesterday’s news offered some haunting hints of increases in COVID-19 cases in the US and other countries. That trend was blamed for the significant drop in the financial markets.
It seems perplexing to me how little my daily activities have been impacted by the ongoing dilemma of the pandemic. I have been lucky to enjoy good health all the while and no one I know directly has reported being diagnosed as becoming sick with the virus.
Basically, nothing of my routine is altered beyond avoiding restaurants and refraining from hugging and shaking people’s hands.
I saw written somewhere that we are all experiencing the same storm, just from different boats. Some are sailing along unscathed in cruise ships and yachts while many more are clinging to whatever they can grab to barely stay afloat.
Cyndie and I are probably in a modest boat that is keeping us dry for now in that metaphoric depiction. That’s more than so many others have.
We are counting our blessings and looking forward to the eventual conquering of the virus, be it months or years.
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Relative Something 