Archive for August 2023
Mad Skills
I can’t swear that crossing our fingers brought the desired result, but we got what we wished. First, they started delivering truckloads of dirt. They came from the right.
They came from the left.
Then they started spreading the dirt so they could bring more loads.
The skid-steer driver employed mad skills, rapidly maneuvering forward and back while moving the bucket with a surprisingly light touch to tap, grade, scoop, and scrape dirt into submission. The knowledge and abilities he demonstrated served to emphatically confirm our belief that hiring professionals for this work would be smarter than trying to somehow do it ourselves
Even if I was able to rent a skid steer and learn how to operate it, I could never come close to achieving what this guy did.
In order to get it all done in one day, he did leave a fair amount of finishing work for us to do ourselves but I’m okay with that. In one afternoon he brought us a heck of a lot closer to the goal we have in mind.
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The driveway is a mess and there are a fair number of big rocks we need to pick up. It will be a challenge to turn all that new dirt into a carpet of healthy grass blades. But the problem of that sharp drop-off has been remedied and is now behind us. We are happy to be able to move on to making everything look nice.
We can start on that after Labor Day weekend. We are heading to the lake today. The dirt will still be here when we return.
Just when I thought the last load of dirt had been delivered, the decision was made to fix the ruts in the drainage swale by simply adding dirt where it was most needed.
They felt it was the least disruptive and the rest of the swale didn’t warrant being dug up to gain so little improvement. I was not about to argue with that logic.
I’m going to cross my fingers for luck that we can turn all that dirt into grass blades (and NOT weeds) swiftly and successfully. Look at me dreaming big!
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Fingers Crossed
What are the odds that our favorite excavating company will actually show up today with a load of black dirt, a skid-steer, and years of know-how to professionally finish the shoulders of our driveway? It’s only been more than a year of waiting since they agreed to help us. When I checked (for the umpteenth time) on Monday and was told it would happen on Wednesday, I assumed he meant next week.
He corrected me and said this week! I wasn’t going to argue. I played along like I fully believed him. Pardon my skepticism.
Still, I have taken steps of preparation in case today really will be the day. A couple of weeks ago, I tried enticing the scheduler with an invitation to do even more work than just the driveway, hoping a bigger job would make the trip worth more to them.
It is time to reshape the drainage swale that passes through both the hay field and the back pasture on the way to moving water off the property toward the closest river. Yesterday I mowed the area to provide a better view of the current topography and, most importantly, to clearly indicate the direct route I want shaped up for the most effective flow.
Looking up to the culvert that brings water under the driveway:
Looking down at the route across the back pasture:
They actually did this for me about ten years ago when I was hoping to permanently establish a well-defined, wide, slow-flowing grassy swale. How naive of me to think any waterway could be permanently shaped. In the years since, two things have happened: an accumulation of sediment has created a high spot beyond which a series of deep ruts have washed out.
After they finish improving the shoulders of the driveway, I’m hoping they will be able to re-grade the drainage swale.
Fingers are crossed. For them to get both jobs completed and, more importantly, that they actually show up today.
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Fence Bit
Because I can, I turned on the US Open tennis tournament last night and caught a very entertaining first-round match between Coco Gauff and Laura Siegemund. It’s a treat to escape from thinking about what needs to be done around here for an hour or two and lose myself in a dramatic battle between two athletes.
I didn’t realize I would also find a ceremony honoring Billie Jean King on the 50th anniversary of her efforts to convince the US Open to give equal pay to women. It is easy to forget that I have lived through as many changes in the world as have occurred in my lifetime. Yet, it seems like there are still so many ways the human race falls short of ideals.
Asher is showing how to lose oneself in a nap.
Cyndie caught him in the landscape pond again. She said this time he went under her makeshift barrier and since she saw him going in, was able to stop him before he destroyed another intake filter. She also reported that he finally got shocked by the electric fence around the pasture.
He seemed pretty subdued to me the rest of the day. I hope he learns to avoid it from here on out.
Shortly after his fence incident, I had the power off while I weed-whipped around it. His timing was just a little off. I’m guessing he doesn’t sense the electric field like the horses can when the wires are “hot.”
I didn’t get bit by fence electricity but I walked into plenty of invisible spider webs yesterday.
Here is one of my phone camera shots where I couldn’t get it to jump to macro lens focus:
The web that wasn’t in focus is one of the few traps I was able to see and thus successfully avoid. The rest are all stuck to my clothes or peeled off my face.
It rained for a few seconds last night, despite the weather radar failing to depict any precipitation overhead. It was too brief to even get anything wet.
I called for an update on the schedule for getting our driveway shoulders professionally finished and was finally given a date.
“Wednesday,” he said.
I assumed he meant next week but, no, he told me it would be this week. I’m not going to hold my breath for that to actually happen.
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Spidey Senses
If I were more industrious about capturing snapshots of the endless number of spiderwebs we encounter this time of year, I might luck out and do one of them justice. Alas, I find myself lamenting the shortcomings of my undisciplined methods when we happen upon a most spectacular specimen of a web but cannot get the iPhone camera I’m carrying to pick up the detail of light reflecting off the individual strands of silk.
Nothing I capture with a lens can compare to the real-life stereo-vision image that my eyes and head movement provide.
The time I came upon a small leaf that appeared to hover in the air on a single line of silk across one of our trails, I had to resort to recording a video and moving the phone around to show the leaf was “magically” floating in the air.
I took a crack at this web on the side of the barn because the lines reaching out to the ground were particularly interesting.
I ended up liking this picture more for the angle of the fence and background field, trees, and sky, and how they contrast with the repeating lines in the metal siding of the barn.
Still, I gave another try to get those strands to the ground.
Just doesn’t come close to what I was seeing with my eyes.
I sure hope all the spiders are feasting on flies around the barn. We are definitely noticing the lack of free-ranging chickens around here by way of the increased amount of nuisance insects since we paused keeping hens.
August isn’t over yet and here I am yearning for a good hard frost to kick off the season without irritating flies and mosquitos. A momentary lapse in my being fully present in the moment.
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What Love
Cyndie went to see The Chicks in concert at the grandstand at the Minnesota State Fair last night. You need to buy a ticket to the fair to get to the grandstand so she got a chance for a little taste of the fair. Last year we went in the middle of the week with anticipation of touring the barn to see some horses. Making our way slowly toward our goal we came upon closed doors and access denied signs because they were cleaning the barn that day.
It didn’t take her long to find horses last night. This is the first picture she sent me after her arrival:
I was home and in charge of keeping the dog out of trouble. I didn’t score very high in that regard.
My session of being in charge started badly enough when I found him standing in the middle of the fenced-off compost area eating fresh manure that I’d dumped in there earlier in the day. The perimeter fence was perfectly intact so he must have simply leaped over it. I’m beyond caring at this point.
I opened the fence to let him out, appreciating his obvious posture of acquiescence telling me he understood he wasn’t supposed to be there. I don’t think he has a clue that we don’t want him messing with manure but that’s another issue.
After that, all went perfectly as I finished mowing and he lolled about patiently. He stayed in the house and out of trouble while I tended to the horses and put equipment away in the shop garage. I was able to shower and have dinner while he lazed around and entertained himself in a manner that was nothing short of ideal.
When I took him outside for the last time of the day, I gave him a reward for his good behavior and tossed balls for him to chase until he tired out. I tried coaxing him toward the house by moving our play to the front yard. I was getting eaten alive by mosquitos and was desperate to get inside. Asher still wanted to play.
I threw more toys for him to chase in the front yard until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went in and watched him through the glass storm door. He chomped on a few toys, ran off into the woods for a time, came back, laid around for a bit, then disappeared again.
He showed up soon after with the filter from the pond pump in his mouth and started tearing it apart. He had pushed down the fence Cyndie erected around the pond and made a mess of things back there in a few seconds of chaos while I waited inside the sunroom door.
I give up.
I forgot. Why did we get another dog?
Cyndie brought me a souvenir from the fair. She got in long after I was asleep so I got this treat for my breakfast this morning. What a love she is.
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Just Dropped
Turns out, Swings’ mask didn’t vanish after all. She just dropped it where I failed to notice, despite walking surprisingly close to that very spot during my search. Cyndie found it yesterday morning.
I will admit to looking for the wrong color mask. Thought it was one of the black ones, although the fact it was light-colored should have made it easier to see.
As we were walking back from rolling our trash and recycling bins to the road yesterday, we came upon Swings’ mask lying in the hay field. Second day in a row she has wrestled her way out of it. I guess she doesn’t want to have it on her head when the weather is so hot and humid. Meanwhile, Mia followed Cyndie around with a cloud of flies on her face while Cyndie was looking for the first lost mask yesterday morning. Mia was lobbying to have her mask on as soon as possible.
While the horses are dealing with flies, our battle has become hordes of increasingly vicious mosquitos. Yesterday they were buzzing my head and as I tried to swat them away, two of them flew behind my sunglasses. Since when do mosquitos fly between eyelids and glass lenses? Makes it really hard to swat them.
Mowing on the zero-turn was a challenge because when I let go of a lever to swat a biting mosquito the tractor immediately turned.
Time for us to start wearing our own “fly masks” of the mosquito netting variety.
I needed more than mosquito netting to fend off wasps that were showing up around the door to the shop. The solution was more of the poisonous chemical variety when I finally located the nest being built in the outdoor light over the door.
That’s where I installed an on/off switch earlier in the year but I haven’t reached up there to turn it on all summer because it never gets dark until late. When I looked up at it, finding the wasp nest was difficult through the scary-looking multi-level webs of some very industrious spider(s).
I forgot to wait until all the wasps had returned at the end of the day so the afternoon got a little dicey as the disgruntled survivors dealt with the disaster discovered upon their return. Oops.
My bad.
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Vanishing Act
One thing about the high humidity of the last two days that I didn’t expect is how spiders and mosquitos have taken over the woods. They probably like that it has been staying warm all night, too. It is very common to walk into a single strand of spider silk that crosses our trails but lately, it has been entire completed webs that remain invisible unless the light hits them at just the right angle.
Even after walking into it, you can’t see it but can feel it sticking and flailing to rub it off is far from successful. So you just flail even more.
Meanwhile, the mosquitos haven’t even been waiting for us to stop walking before buzzing our ears and attacking in numbers. It scares me if I have to pause and wait for Asher to do his business for fear I will be carried off by the marauders. I just resort to flailing as if I had just walked into a spider web.
One action that solves two problems.
So, Swings lost her fly mask yesterday. When we left the barn after serving their morning feed, all four horses had masks on, the fans were running on high, and we’d put out extra water for the day. When Cyndie checked on them mid-morning, Swings wasn’t wearing a mask.
We have not seen them venturing far from the fans very often since this nasty heat dome arrived so we both figured the mask shouldn’t be hard to spot. We were wrong. It was nowhere in sight around the overhang or inside the paddock. Nothing was visible looking out at the fields near the gates.
When serving their evening food, I took a walk through portions of the hay field and found nothing. At sunset, when closing up the barn and removing masks from the other three, I walked around in the back pasture and, again, found nothing.
That mask has vanished. We have no idea where she lost it. Usually, they rub up against something, so trees and fence posts are likely targets. I don’t believe the horses would have hustled out for a short visit to one of the fields and then returned before Cyndie showed up to check on them, so logic tells me it should be inside the paddocks.
I will expect to find it this morning while patrolling the taller growth in the paddock with the wheelbarrow looking for new piles of manure.
One other unlikely thing happened during this heat wave. We found a large branch about 3-4 inches in diameter lying in the yard beneath one of our larger oak trees first thing in the morning. It wasn’t windy and the wood looked healthy so I have no idea why such a large branch broke off.
When cutting it up, I saved several good sections for sculpting hearts and two long pieces that have a nice pattern. They will make for some nice coasters.
Can’t wait to do some sanding and polishing to see how they will look when all cleaned up. You know, do a vanishing act of those blade marks on the surfaces!
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Our Turn
It arrived with a vengeance yesterday. It is our turn to cope with Earth’s new reality of oppressive heat waves. Tropical dew point temperatures push the high heat to feel ten degrees hotter and land us well into three-digit heat index numbers.
As with every weather extreme, the horses just seem to roll with it. We left fans on high under the overhang and they didn’t expend any more effort than necessary all day long.
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Wearing masks to give their eyes a break from the never-ending harassment from flies, they stayed in the shade where the attack of solar energy was ameliorated by a degree or two. Well, except for Mia. When we showed up to serve their evening feeding, she was out grazing in the back pasture all by herself.
Cyndie decided to walk down and offer Mia a pan in the shade which she promptly accepted. It was uncomfortably hot but not intolerable with pockets of cooler air wafting out from under the shade trees on an occasional breeze.
Asher came out with us and pounced into the woods to force squirrels into hasty retreats to the highest branches above. When horses were tended to, Asher was more than happy to return with us to lie on the cool tile floor of our air-conditioned living space.
I took advantage of avoiding outdoor work by giving in to a delicious afternoon nap in the recliner. What a privileged life we live.
I shudder to comprehend how people in places where this kind of heat lasts for months deal with nights that don’t get cool. We went down to the barn just before sunset to close things up, turn off the fans, and remove fly masks but the heat had barely budged from the peak in the afternoon.
Light was sweating, which wasn’t visible when we fed them earlier. The heat of the day was still accumulating.
Our turn dealing with the blast furnace of this over-heating planet will be mercifully short. After today things will moderate a bit and by Saturday the forecast looks almost chilly in comparison.
The horses give me a sense that they understand this and use that superpower to bolster their impressive art of coping when conditions are just plain miserable.
Our retreat to the geothermally cooled house is a less impressive method of coping, but it is oh. so. effective.
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Distorted Perspective
If it wasn’t so indescribable and unrecognizable, this would have been a candidate for my image-guessing game.
What the heck is that? It’s not The Bean (Cloud Gate) in Chicago but it could be a close cousin located at the Big Stone Sculpture Garden.
I like how the zoomed-in square photo has a hint of a snow-globe vibe. I don’t know that the sculpture is recognizable from that close view, except maybe to someone who just visited the site in the last few days. Even then, I’m not sure what the official description is for this wavy-shaped, mirrored blob that would appropriately identify it.
It made for a good blog post subject though. Entertainment for the eyes.
Not to mention it served me well since I didn’t take any pictures of the horses getting their hooves trimmed yesterday. It was not an easy day for the farrier, Heather, because the horses –more specifically, the chestnuts, Mia, and Light– were more skittish than usual and were not cooperative at all about standing on three legs for any span of time.
Their equine “pedicure” was somewhat truncated. Functionally sound, but cosmetically rough looking.
The other thing I didn’t take a picture of was my solution for getting the zero-turn tractor tipped up so I could clean out the bottom of the mower deck. After surfing through images of ramps for lifting cars that I was considering buying to lift the tractor, I thought up a way to do it with material I already had on hand.
There was an old deck board on the floor in the shop garage that I cut in two and propped up on the loader bucket of the diesel tractor parked right there. I screwed a couple of scrap chunks of 2×4 on each board to lock them in position on the bucket. It resulted in enough angle that I can lay beneath it and have reasonable access to the entirety of the 42-inch deck.
It also gave me a good view of the poor condition of the mower blades. I’m afraid the amount of rocks and sticks I hit this year while learning to steer with two levers has shortened the life of the blades considerably. I don’t feel bad about it. I knew what I’d gotten myself into and consider it a cost for not getting the driveway shoulders finished yet.
I hope to remedy that before fall is over, but maybe I’m revealing a bit of my own distorted perspective about the possibility. The landscaper we are waiting on does not have a strong track record of showing up in a timely fashion, or sometimes, responding to us at all.
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Relative Something 