Archive for July 2023
Different Showroom
On Wednesday, the asphalt crew showed up promptly to work on sealing the surface of our year-old driveway pavement. Since we wouldn’t want to drive on it for at least 24 hours, we moved both cars out of the garage. I parked mine down beside the barn and Cyndie put hers by the road, knowing she would be leaving right in the middle of the time they were working.
I hadn’t considered the fact she would be returning home with a car full of groceries. That wasn’t a big problem because we always have the ability to drive through our fields if need be. While the horses were up by the barn, I opened the hay field gate by the road, pulled inside the fence, and closed the gate behind me.
As I crested the hill in the middle of the field, I watched for a reaction from the horses to a car approaching in the middle of their grazing territory. For whatever possible reason, they were surprisingly unfazed. I had Cyndie open a paddock gate so I could drive right through and the horses didn’t even look at us.
That should have been it for the night. By early yesterday afternoon, we could drive the cars up to the house. However, stormy weather showed up. Threats of big wind and large hail loomed large. We pondered the situation while constantly updating weather radar images.
If we did nothing, we feared the one day both of our cars were parked outside would be the day it would hail something awful.
The best way to make sure it wouldn’t hail was to move both cars into the barn. I wish I knew what the horses thought of us turning the place into an automobile showroom for a day.
Of course, the move worked wonders. Not a single hailstone fell from the clouds while the cars were protected. It did, however, provide us with ease of mind as multiple waves of cloudbursts passed overhead throughout the evening.
On a completely unrelated note, we have recently given Asher several opportunities to be outside with us without tethering him to a leash, mostly without incident. He dashes away into the surrounding woods on occasion but returns soon enough.
“Mostly without incident” indicates there was one situation that I will call an ‘incident.’ While he was off on his own, Asher took unwelcome liberties with the freshest composting manure pile, rubbing his chest, the vest we make him wear outdoors, and his collar thoroughly in the stinkiest green horse shit dumped on the pile earlier that morning.
Seems to me he is making a statement that he wants to be a full-time outdoor dog.
I didn’t expect this would become one of the problems with wanting him to be able to roam untethered on our property.
Just yuck. Really, really yuck.
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Returning Again
This saga continues… The replacement rainfly that I was so excited about receiving from The North Face warranty department last year needs to be returned for the same reason I sent back the original rainfly. The seam sealing tape is coming loose.
I used the rainfly for just one week while on the Tour of Minnesota trip in June and discovered a few drips as proof that it leaks.
Not wanting to deal with shipping the rainfly back to face unknown odds of their ability to solve the problem, I pulled it out of storage yesterday to assess how bad the delamination really is. Would it be possible to buy some sealer and brush it on the seams myself?
It didn’t take long to decide I wasn’t up for the challenge. There are just too many places where the original tape has lost contact with the fabric. Also, I’m not certain which version of a seam sealer would match the fabric. Urethane or silicone?
The label on the rainfly says- Fly: 100% Polyester, Canopy: 100% Nylon. Huh? Canopy? I have no idea how to interpret this information.
I sent an email to The North Face warranty department seeking advice, even though it was after hours there. What did I have to lose?
That company impressed me once again. I received a reply 14 minutes later, at 6:12 p.m. from their Customer Care Team. They reminded me that items must be returned for assessment and provided a label for shipping.
I don’t know if they will be able to help me or not since my tent is obsolete, but I’m impressed enough with The North Face to give them another try. It’s my guess that the replacement rainfly they sent me was on a shelf somewhere for nearly as long as I’ve owned this tent. Even though it hadn’t been subject to harsh weather, time alone was tough enough on the materials they use to degrade the adhesive of the sealing tape.
Since the tent is obsolete, I doubt they have any fresh versions of this rainfly laying around in their warehouse. And since they didn’t see fit to reapply seam sealant to the original rainfly I returned, I am suspicious about the likelihood of them deciding to do so on this one.
I’ll give them another chance, just in case I’m wrong. It buys me more time to kick and scream against solving my problems by simply purchasing a new tent that was manufactured in this century.
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Flexible Scheduling
One hard and fast rule that is good to keep in mind is that scheduled events aren’t necessarily hard and fast or guaranteed to play out as planned. It pays to be flexible. Yesterday, Cyndie and I got out of bed a little earlier than usual because we were expecting a visit from a veterinarian who was going to check the horse’s teeth and give them required rabies vaccination shots.
We closed gates to confine the horses and put halters on all four of them in preparation and then headed up to the house for breakfast. It wasn’t long until Cyndie received a text that the vet would need to reschedule due to an unplanned emergency call.
I headed back out to open gates and remove halters.
Later, as I was filling a wheelbarrow with composted manure for our driveway landscaping project, I got a call from our asphalt company asking if they could reschedule sealing the driveway from July 27th to tomorrow (now, today!). That call was soon followed by news of a plan for the vet to come at 1:00.
Shortly after noon, Cyndie received a text that the vet had another emergency call and wouldn’t make it until some future day to be determined. I don’t know if that will be soon because there was a month-long wait to get the first appointment.
Asher had a pretty good day of testing his off-leash limits. Cyndie decided to use a lot of bribing with high-value treats to entice him to stay close to home and that seemed to pay off. I didn’t like him having free access to the compost area where I witnessed him eating manure from the freshest pile on two different occasions.
Cyndie let Asher help her out where she was pulling weeds.
I’m not sure if he got that one by the roots or not. Can’t see to the bottom of the resulting hole.
It will be interesting trying to keep his paws off the driveway while the seal coat is fresh. Hopefully, Asher is flexible about our schedule of off-leash practice because it will be on hold for at least a day starting this afternoon… if all goes as planned.
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Modifying Finish
We have not discovered the secret to convincing our favorite gravel guy to come landscape the bottom half of our driveway. Since we have reached the point of not even receiving callbacks from him, I’m assuming we will need to look for another source of landscaping help if we’re not able to do it ourselves.
In the interim, we are taking a crack at applying an improvement to our original thinking about how to finish the edge of the driveway asphalt in the sections where we already tried smoothing the grade with some composted manure.
The limiting factor in this plan is the relatively small supply of our manufactured soil currently available for the task. I wrestled with the decision of using what little material we have in places where none has yet to be applied or using it to improve the areas landscaped last summer.
I went with the latter, for now.
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I have settled into a pattern of creating piles roughly 1 meter wide by 1m deep by 1m high. The small pile on the left in the foreground of the first photo is just getting started and receives new, fresh manure daily. The pile in the foreground on the right is no longer getting any new material added and it is cooking at a perfect composting temperature.
The pile just behind them is in the final stage of composting. Just beyond that one is an area shown in the second photo where I just removed two composted piles to use for the driveway landscaping project. In the background is a large pile that was created over the winter and never got turned in order to fully compost.
I will use that for fill eventually but it needs to be broken apart to dry out because the majority inside is a stinky green mess due to never having been regularly turned to promote the composting process.
My attempt to finish the driveway edge last summer using the remaining exposed gravel left me with a rocky lip that I now want to eliminate. The new plan is to pull down the gravel to form a more even slope and to cover it all with dirt or compost right up to the asphalt.
We will need to plant grass to provide some competition for the weeds that absolutely love an opportunity to sprout in freshly exposed soil.
I had originally envisioned the possibility of having a gravel edge along the asphalt. Now I want to just cover the rock completely. Driveway edge landscaping two-point-oh.
If I find this latest plan works, I will probably order a load of black dirt and do this the rest of the way down the driveway.
I think I could convince our favorite gravel guy to at least deliver a truckload of dirt and dump it down by the road if they don’t have to spread it. Time and labor seem to be their main shortage and that is something I am able to provide.
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Different Language
I had no idea how complex the language is in NFL play calling until I heard it in the Netflix docuseries, “Quarterback.” Wow. Just wow. When I played as a kid, we said things like, “Screen pass right” or “End around.” Now they rattle off a series of bizarre combinations of words that sound as though they were tossed together like a salad.
In addition, they scream it out so fast it makes my head spin. If I was tired, sweating profusely, and being bombarded by the sound of a stadium full of crazy fans shouting at the top of their lungs, I don’t think I could process what the quarterback was reciting.
Somehow, a majority of the time, 11 guys all function in unison to execute the word salad that the quarterback called out. It gives me a whole new respect for what those athletes are doing in this sport.
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This 3-quarterback glimpse (I’ve only watched the first 4 episodes so far) has also helped me to have a better feel for the abuse an NFL quarterback endures every time a defensive player is able to make solid contact.
I will forever remember the groaning sound Kirk Cousins made in the recording of one particular hit because he made that sound as he lay on the ground after the hit, as he walked toward the sideline when he got up and he continued that groan even after he plopped down on the team bench to recover.
There’s no denying the fact that I’m largely enjoying this series because one of the featured quarterbacks happens to be the starter for a team I grew up watching, the Minnesota Vikings, but I’m finding the episodes fascinating enough that I’m convinced it would be worth it even if my team wasn’t represented.
One thing I’ll take from watching this is a greater inclination to forgive a team for “Too Much Time” infractions between plays or other mental errors.
They all must be struggling to cope with speaking “football (American)” as a second language. FSL.
“Y whatever.” [watch episode 4 to grasp that reference…]
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Unfortunate Crashes
This year’s Tour de France bike race has been entertaining but I do not enjoy the added drama of nasty crashes. The worst is when an incident is triggered by the carelessness of a fan as happened this morning.
I love having access to watch from home but it is sad when the motorcycles with the camera operators get in the way of a racer trying to break away from a competitor.
I’m soaking up the race while enjoying fresh-picked wild black raspberries on my yogurt with eggs and toast spread with Cyndie’s blackcap jam.
We are enduring the latest onslaught of dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfires that turns the splashes of color in the woods to an eery shade of orange.
You can see speckles of it on the fresh dirt Asher has thrown as he created a new canyon in a matter of seconds yesterday. He and I spent much of the day alone together while Cyndie attended a funeral in the Cities and then met with a group of her gang of high school friends who got together for lunch to celebrate a series of birthdays.
When Asher wasn’t napping, he demanded constant attention that had me kicking him a ball to chase and then I would need to retrieve it from beneath furniture where he pretended to “bury” it.
He’s almost a year and a half old and shows little indication of growing out of puppy energy any time soon. During this phase, I find I am much more inclined to ‘crash’ long before he does throughout each day.
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We’re Learning
“I’m not there yet.”
“But you don’t know where you’re going.”
“At least I am going.”
Cyndie has a tee shirt with the phrase, “Not all who wander are lost.” Well, not all who are lost, wander, so there.
That reversal of thinking reminds me of a cartoon I saw that showed two birds with binoculars sitting on a branch in a tree, exclaiming, “Ooh! A khaki-vested paunch belly!” The panel was titled: The Birdwatcherwatchers.
Yesterday we had our final of two private sessions with the trainer from our 6-session dog obedience class. All things considered, Asher is doing great for his age and the relatively short amount of time he has been living with us. It gives me hope for future progress potential.
The amount of success won’t be limited by his ability to learn but by our ability to improve our skills of consistently delivering timely commands, acknowledgments, and rewards. One clear example of what Cyndie and I need to work on is our goal of teaching a “Leave it!” command.
We now know we have been forgetting this is a two-part command. If Asher ‘leaves it’ we are happy to go on our way but since all the things we are working on involve our dog checking back with us, we need to teach Asher to look back at our eyes for confirmation of ‘leaving it.’
He gets rewarded for looking back at us after obeying the command, not for simply ignoring a particular object of interest.
We walked through an exercise several times where our common mistakes were repeating commands (he will learn to ignore repetitive words out of our mouths), tugging the leash for compliance (what if he’s off-leash? He will learn to wait for the tug, and if it doesn’t come, compliance must not be required), and failing to notice when he looked up at us for confirmation/reward.
What worked best for us was to have the trainer talk us through the routine as it was happening. Could she just follow us around all the time?
I was so tired driving home after the session I struggled mightily to stay alert. Cyndie served a mid-afternoon snack while I read in my recliner and then sleep overcame me. That’s one way to lose track of a day.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll get there eventually.
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Fly Whip
Throughout the spring and summer, the horses go through phases of showing emphatic frustration with being harrassed by flies and stoically tolerating their persistent presence. I stood for a while yesterday and watched Swings manipulate her tail. A horse swishing their tail is a quintessential aspect of the animal.
It is iconic. It is what they do.
As I focused on Swings’ tail movements, a new level of appreciation arose in me. The amazing number of subtle muscle movements at the dock of the tail can make the long hairs (the skirt) twirl around in a circle, snap like a whip, or strike a fly on their underbelly.
The gyrations of the skirt become an artistic random wave pattern with a really long reach.
I have been swatted in the face many times as I wander too close when filling hay bags or scooping manure while the horses are eating from their feed pans and swishing away flies.
It is almost always unintentional on their part. The exception is Mix demonstrating remnants of the food aggression she showed when the horses first arrived.
Mix still has moments when she very intentionally shows us her powerful awesomeness.
I admit to smugly enjoying that her ploys don’t intimidate me, partly because she just as quickly will approach and gently share breaths with me.
She never does that (share breaths) with the flies buzzing around her head.
Cyndie and Asher pulled up the driveway yesterday just as I was sitting down in the front yard to enjoy a popsicle on a break from using the power trimmer along fence lines. They both seemed happy to be home again.
I’m pretty happy about it, too.
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Score Goals
Here’s a thought… If your national soccer team is in a big tournament, their success would be greatly aided if they would score goals at some point during the 90 minutes of regulation time. Color me frustrated with the U.S. Men’s Team performance last night.
Meanwhile, the surroundings here have been especially tranquil the last two days. The air quality has been downright tolerable. The temperature and humidity have been eminently comfortable. Yesterday’s rain was gentle and brief.
I am well aware of the contrast in places like southern California where a landslide destroyed homes and now that part of the country is bracing for a ‘historic’ heat wave. In Vermont, flooding rains have resulted in dramatic damage.
Counting my blessings while things are all quiet here. Cyndie and Asher are due to return home today so it probably won’t stay as quiet as my last few days.
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Long Days
Catching up on daily tasks after more than a week away is a small price to pay for the extended time I was able to relax at the lake, but that doesn’t mean catching up is easy. I’m not saying that it’s hard, but it does tend to require long days when I’m also attempting to watch daily Tour de France races in the morning.
Things will calm down when Cyndie gets home, but there will also then be the added responsibility of caring for Asher when they return. For now, I’m benefiting from our decision to keep him at the lake with Cyndie because none of my time needs to be assigned to his needs.
I successfully created a steaming pile from the week’s-worth of dumped manure our horse sitter collected.
It’s cooking perfectly after just one day of shaping the mess into a composting mound.
After mowing around the barn with the zero-turn lawn tractor, I took care of the labyrinth with the push mower. Then, I cleaned the waterer in the paddocks and fed the horses. Next came the exercise of moving hay bales from the shed into the barn.
Normally, that would have been enough to send me in for a shower, which would allow for dinner at a reasonable hour. Yesterday was not normal, so I got out the diesel tractor and cut the weeds in the paddock with the brush cutter. While I had that tractor out, I also knocked down the portion of growth along the inside of the hay field fence that gets missed when the hay gets cut and baled.
I have wanted that done since the field was cut almost a month ago. Even though that pushed my dinner an hour and a half later than I prefer, the accomplishment was worth it. It becomes one less thing I will need to do today.
That gives me time to watch more bike racing this morning! Yay!
One time-consuming task I am neglecting is berry picking.
I’m hoping they will survive on the vine for a few more days so Cyndie can tackle that project. When I finish cutting all the grass (weeds), I need to complete the trimming of fence lines and then use the hedge cutter to knock back the growth leaning in along our pathways.
While mowing the labyrinth, I noticed the hedge trimmer is needed on the outer circle path where the jungle-like growth from the woods is encroaching on the air space.
It’s no surprise that managing all the growth around here makes for long days. Good thing the place looks gorgeous when I’m all caught up on the mowing and trimming. That makes it all well worth it.
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Relative Something 