Archive for January 2023
Best Thing
It was a farrier day on the ranch yesterday. That is when the horses get the 8-10 week growth of their hooves trimmed back. One of the best things about farrier day is that Cyndie always wants to serve treats to the farrier and the two folks from This Old Horse who show up to facilitate the process. That meant I took off my “horse wrangler” hat for a couple of hours in order to wear my “baker’s assistant” hat in the kitchen.
The aromas in Cyndie’s kitchen when she is baking cookies always beats the aromas wafting around down at the barn.
Imagine, if you will, the smell of the ginger biscuit cookies, mingling with the almond spritz, and the chai spritz cookies fresh out of the hot oven. Really, the cookies aren’t the best thing as much as the aroma of the cookies is the best thing. Anticipation usually beats out a real event when it comes to our perceptions.
The satisfying crunch and the explosion of sweet flavors certainly deserve plenty of votes for the best thing, but that aroma is tops. Maybe it’s because the delicious smells show up first and hang around longer than it takes to finish baking them.
I was able to receive a moment of satisfaction after putting my “horse wrangler” hat back on, upon successfully getting halters on all four horses before the crew showed up at the appointed hour. I started with Swings but ended up leaving her until last when she made it clear she wasn’t interested. The other three accepted their halters without hesitation, much to my relief. Swings required my patient persistence before she finally stayed still long enough for me to get a strap over her nose and another one over the back of her neck to slide through the buckle.
She just needs to flaunt her bad self several times until she can convey that she’s choosing to wear the halter on her terms, not ours. There’s probably a term for humans who behave that way but I hesitate to assign any such labels to our mares, especially since Swings is the oldest.
She’s probably earned the right to demand a little extra respect.
I could argue that the best thing about the day was that the farrier succeeded in hitting all 16 hooves within the hour she had available because it might be the first time one of the horses (can you say, Light?) didn’t pitch a fit and lose trimming privileges on one or more feet by the end of the session.
Granted, Light did end up receiving only rudimentary filing on her fronts, but none of the horses’ hooves required much more than that this time around so we are calling yesterday’s session a victory.
Plus, there are cookies left over for John and Cyndie to enjoy. That’s just the best, don’t you think?
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Second Greatest
As I stepped out our front door to get my shovels for clearing off the deck yesterday morning, I heard the sound of a car engine in front of our garage doors. I came around the corner to find a gentleman walking around his car and we exchanged greetings. He said he lived just five miles away near the Rush River and added that our place looked really beautiful.
Dawn, Sunday morning.
Then he said he wanted to tell me about three things in the Bible… I politely interrupted him to let him know he didn’t need to finish. He asked how long we’d lived here and we shared a few more tidbits about ourselves. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a little proselytizing, myself.
I said that I am all about love. He lit up and said love was what Christianity was about. My response is that love is what all religions are about.
My second greatest accomplishment after taking action to treat my depression is my enlightenment about embracing love as the single most important intention humans should focus on every single day in our thoughts and actions as we navigate our way through life. Love for other people, ALL people, animals, nature, the planet, ourselves, the universe, and mysteries in planes of existence we can’t even prove exist.
When you allow yourself to truly love, it makes it easier to forgive.
Love is magical.
Yesterday morning was a foggy one. It was a freezing fog, actually. While feeding the horses and cleaning up, I made my way in and out of the barn many times, getting their feed pans, filling bags of hay, getting the wheelbarrow and scooper, and retrieving their empty feed pans. Each time I came out of the barn, the fog had increased.
Dusk, yesterday afternoon.
First, I couldn’t see the evergreen trees across the road. Then, I couldn’t see the road. Eventually, I couldn’t see anything around us. It didn’t last long but it was around long enough for delicate ice crystals to form on everything the fog touched. I loved it!
While I was visiting with the guy in front of our garage, the icy crystals started snowing down off tree branches all at once. It created a fairy tale scene that made it seem like we were in a snow globe ornament.
At noon, I went down to the barn and worked on freeing the big sliding doors from ice that formed after the last storm of freezing drizzle and rain/drizzle/snow. A little calcium chloride helped get the job done.
With our winter hours, I’ve been feeding horses in the morning before the sun comes up and in the afternoon after the sun has gone down.
I sure love the views we get to enjoy.
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Greatest Accomplishment
I’ve been contemplating a life well-lived after remotely participating in a funeral online last week and then learning of an anticipated death in our friends’ family. Being in the phase of life when I’m closer to my death than I am to my birth, it occurs to me that my greatest accomplishments are quite possibly behind me as opposed to yet to come.
Most days, I feel that my greatest achievement happened when I took action to get treatment for depression. After many years of self-denial about what I was battling, receiving the confirmation of a professional diagnosis was the key that opened the door for my journey toward healthy thinking. Initially relying on medication and talk therapy to interrupt a life-long pattern of dysfunctional thinking, I eventually gained enough command of my faculties to cope on my own, medication-free.
One book I found helpful is “Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach You and Medication Can’t Give You” by Richard O’Connor.
I still need to treat my natural inclination toward depression every day with healthy thinking, a reasonable diet, regular exercise, and good-quality sleep habits, but reaching the point where I don’t require support from the medical health industry is something I am proud to have achieved.
Last November and December brought a fresh challenge for me in managing the chemicals bathing my brain in the face of grief and fatigue. The combination of needing to first put down our cat, Pequenita, and then our dog, Delilah, mixed with striving to cope with Cyndie’s unexpected injury pushed me to my limits. I was the sole person tending to the horses (during which two highly stressful horse-health challenges arose), cleared snow after two significant snowfall events, and took over all tasks caring for Cyndie and the house while she is laid up.
The physical fatigue left me susceptible to allowing my old familiar depressive behaviors to return. I don’t find that worrisome because years of good mental health have provided a fresh setting for “normal” that I use for reference, allowing me to notice when intervention is warranted. I have a variety of options to employ but the key to being able to self-treat my depression is the “noticing” and consciously changing something in response.
Mostly, I change my thinking. My thoughts are a major trigger to the chemical reactions going on in my brain and body. Sometimes I just need a nap. Often times I just need more time. Especially when the trigger is grief.
Speaking of grief, the horses were giving me some grief recently. This is a case where it would have been nice to have a camera recording what goes on under the overhang when we are not around.
Somehow they picked up the grate in one of the slow feeder boxes and turned it sideways. I guess they’ve got some great accomplishments of their own to neigh about.
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Ice Roads
After a week and a half of being homebound, Cyndie and I set out yesterday to pick up groceries she ordered online, get her prescription meds from the pharmacy, drop off packages at UPS, and fill gas cans for ATV fuel. We got our first look at how the rest of the area has dealt with the messy winter weather I’ve been battling at home.
The evidence of what freezing drizzle followed by rain, followed by snow, a little more freezing drizzle, and then snow and more snow over two or three days was clearly revealed in the condition of our township roads. We felt like we were on an episode of the reality television series “Ice Road Truckers.”
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I feel a lot better about the accomplishments I have achieved on our driveway road, walkways, and roof eaves. No wonder it seemed like such a Herculean task.
Thankfully, once we reached the larger highways, the pavement was clear and dry, relieving us of continued transportation stress as we tended to all our errands. On the return home on the icy roads, the threat of spinning into a ditch wasn’t as scary because we had all the provisions we might need to survive until help arrived.
We catch a break for at least a week, based on the published forecasts void of new precipitation probabilities. I plan to remove blankets from the horses this afternoon to free them from the unneeded coverage. With temps in the single digits this morning, I chose to let them enjoy the morning feed without additional disruption.
With the weather having such an impact on our activities day in and day out, is it any surprise that it ends up being the first topic of conversation when people gather?
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Roof Raking
It’s a dose of preventive medicine. I pull snow off the edges of the roof of our house to avert possible ice dams that can cause water leaks. It is a project that looms ominously before I can get to it, as icicles grow to incredible lengths. The work is strenuous to execute, requiring extended time with my arms overhead wrestling the rake into position and pulling it back down full of snow. That effort creates a mess below that needs to be shoveled away after it has compacted into a hard and heavy pile. But when completed, it offers a pleasing psychological reward every time I walk toward the house and spot the cleaned eaves.
I cleared the valley over the front door a day earlier and since then, plenty of evaporation has already occurred.
The toughest part of the whole project is that it only lasts until the next snowstorm.
In the meantime, the absence of concern about out-of-sight water problems is a deeply satisfying reward for the hassles associated with raking snow off the roof.
Since today happens to be January 7th, 2023, I would like to give a shout-out to anyone who happens to become old enough on this date to qualify for collecting their social security funds. Happy Birthday, DRH! Hope you don’t have mountains of snow on your roof up in the northland.
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Wintervale Road
In a day-long deja vu yesterday, it felt a bit like pushing a rock up a hill to repeat everything I accomplished the day before, plowing and shoveling to clear snow from the driveway and walkways. I’m thinking I should change the way I think about that 900-foot ribbon of pavement between the road and our house. It’s more like a road than a driveway. I have christened it, “Wintervale Road.”
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The snowbanks along the edges have officially reached a height too high for my ATV plow blade to spray snow into the ditch. Now the chunks of snow just roll back onto the driveway road behind me.
We aren’t expecting additional snow in the next week, so I catch a break there, but it doesn’t look like temperatures will be warm enough to melt down any of the mountains of snow that have piled up.
I did a little experimenting with knocking down the snowbanks using a hand shovel. It was easier than I anticipated to accomplish good progress but the reality remains that it’s a long road to be doing it by hand. However, in the summer, we worked on pulling up the gravel along the shoulder by hand for the entire 900-foot length, so it’s not something that is beyond my way of making incremental progress.
There remains plenty to be done before I can even think about chipping away on that task. I need to pull the snow off our roof, shovel the piles that develop below, and then plow around the hay shed and in front of the barn.
After that, it becomes a battle of the lure of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle versus toiling away on trimming back the snowbanks on Wintervale Road.
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Looks Pretty
Sure, it looks pretty but that doesn’t mean it isn’t brutal. The freezing drizzle of Tuesday coated tree branches with ice and overnight snow stuck to that ice creating a gorgeous landscape yesterday morning.
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Contrary to the report Cyndie heard from one misguided weather reporter on the radio who attempted to soften the blow of the mounting accumulation of snow by saying it was light and fluffy, I was faced with sticky, heavy snow to be shoveled and plowed.
I didn’t get very far with the plow before the winch rope came off a pulley because of the heavy snow and got wedged so tight I couldn’t get the blade to move up or down. It was back to the shop garage to correct the situation.
I decided to use the occasion to swap out the old, fraying winch rope with a new one I bought recently to have as a backup. While I was reworking things, I also decided to leave the pulley off altogether and route the rope through the tubing of the front bumper. I’m not sure what new problems this setup might produce, but it will for sure eliminate the repeating problems I’ve had with that dang pulley.
My efforts proved sufficient for completing the clearing of the pavement. I left the gravel portion around the hay shed for today.
The snow was so sticky I could only push up to the edge, never up and over. That portion needed to be accomplished by hand shoveling. It got me thinking, after hours of sweat and grunting, that I could suddenly see the attraction of living in a retirement community complex. I could sleep in, take as much time as I want to read the paper, and have breakfast. Maybe spend some time on a jigsaw puzzle. Take a nap in the afternoon. All this while staff was responsible for doing all the plowing and shoveling after snow storms.
I also was thinking that if I was an employee clearing snow at Wintervale when the job got this brutal, I would tell the boss more resources were needed. They need to assign more people to work on the project and give us more time to get it all done. Better equipment might help, too. A skid steer with a loader and snowblower attachments would be great.
Thinking about things like that helps me pass the time as I throw scoops of snow higher and higher over the growing mountains piled around the edges.
I’m not looking forward to daylight when I will be able to see how much new snow fell overnight.
Regardless of how much it is, I’m sure the new snow will look very pretty.
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Brutal Weather
Have I mentioned how much I detest rain in winter? Yes. Yes, I have mentioned it. Yesterday, we got everything the weather forecast promised. Starting with a freezing drizzle that was barely perceptible, beyond the fact the handles of my tools were developing a slippery coating. That transitioned into plain old sleet which then magically turned into a brief spurt of rainfall. Just enough rain to make a mess of everything.
Might as well top that off with some heavy snow, eh? You know, that 1-2 inch-per-hour rate stuff. Luckily, we caught a break as the system spun and our region only received a short amount of that snow before we were graced with a few hours in the eye of the storm, void of any precipitation.
If you were a horse in this kind of weather, what would you do?
After a few days without blankets, I covered the horses back up on Monday while they were dry to give them some protection from the wetness that arrived yesterday. Now, just because they have blankets on, that is no reason to become heedless of the elements.
Apparently, the chestnuts, Light, and Mia, figured they would be protected beneath the bare branches of the dying willow tree in the small paddock.
I have no idea if they noticed it wasn’t doing much toward keeping them dry.
I don’t know what Mix was thinking.
So close. Maybe, once she got her head out of the falling ice/flakes/raindrops, she figured that was good enough.
If I were a horse, I hope I would choose the option Swings smartly relies upon for comfort and well-being.
Dry as can be, which is quite a feat in the kind of weather giving us the business yesterday. The kind of winter weather that conjures up the word brutal in my mind.
Plowing and shoveling was a bitch. It’s heart-attack snow. It’s hurt your back shoveling kind of snow. It is “slip while trying to shovel” conditions. It’s just. Plain. Brutal.
How many days till spring?
Not that I’m counting, or anything. When I was younger, winter was my favorite season.
When I was younger, it didn’t rain in the winter.
When I was younger, brutal just meant a LOT of snow, maybe a little drifting wind. Sometimes really cold. Since I wasn’t responsible for plowing or shoveling as a kid, winter storms were all fun with occasional cold wrists in the gap between my mittens and the sleeves of my snowsuit.
Getting old can be brutal.
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Waste Not
This is my reality: horses waste hay. Not only do I need to clean up their manure every day, but they dump a tragic amount of hay on the ground that I have to deal with, too. I think there is a grass in the mix that they don’t prefer and they eat around it to get bites of something more pleasing to their refined palettes.
I had just filled a hay net that Swings moseyed up to for some post-feed pan noshing yesterday morning. After passing by to deal with other housekeeping around the overhang, I caught sight of all these bites already on the ground.
Really? -_-
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The horses have split their time evenly between the nets and the slow-feeder boxes. They waste about the same amount when eating from either one. Sometimes I find the uneaten hay wadded up and nosed out of their way on top of the grate in the boxes and sometimes they pull it all out and drop it on the ground.
When I showed up to serve the last feeding in the afternoon, this is how it looked:
To maintain my signature pristine accommodations under the overhang, I have taken to raking up all the wasted hay each day and piling it to the side just beyond the overhang.
Here’s the part that gets me: the horses then rummage through those piles (mixed with mud and random bits of manure that get raked up with it) and eat from there. Maybe they are pulling out stray bits of good hay that were accidentally mixed in with the bites they dropped to the ground.
I also notice they like to stand on the piles of hay, I presume for the combination of insulation from the cold ground and the bit of cushion from the surface of packed, frozen sand. It just adds incentive for me to continue clearing it out of my way from under the overhang and letting them have at it in piles on the side.
Since we don’t ration their hay, they almost always have more than enough. Occasionally, I’ll notice they power through a net-full or a bale in the boxes with little to no waste. I think it depends on how cold they are. My take on that is they are showing me the waste is a function of them simply being picky.
I could be wrong. Different bales could come from different parts of a field that provide a mixture of grasses more or less to their liking.
Still, how do you think it makes me feel when they choose to throw their food all over the ground? Waste not, want not.
I run a nice place here. First-rate service. Show some respect, will ya, horses?
Geesh.
Don’t get me started about my beef with them dropping manure all over the place in the dining area. It’s like these beasts were born in a barn or something.
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Hugs
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he still remembers
when she didn’t offer that hug
he wanted the most
loss of connection
can be worse
than never connecting at all
erosion implosion
feeding backward emotion
spirals intertwined
smokily lingering
longer than matters
except matters of the heart
follow special rules
and their own sweet time
quietly divine
energy field lines
spine-tingling kinds
minds can’t forget
what cells still recall
embodied realities
toppling over
in a free for all fall
long after lights out
when dreamland pulls back covers
to mystical worlds
featuring hugs
unconfined
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Relative Something 