Archive for December 2023
End Near
On the last day of the year 2023, I was considering looking back through the images in my blog library to review what happened in our lives in the last 12 months. I couldn’t finish a scan through the images because the pictures stopped loading for some unknown reason.
That’s similar to my attempt to complete the installation of our new WiFi repeater cabling yesterday. I couldn’t finish because icy conditions kept me off the roof.
In the morning the heavy frost made the shingles way too slippery so I concentrated on the indoor work. Later in the day, a freezing mist started to fall on top of the frost that hadn’t dissipated. This morning there is a fraction of an inch of snow on top of the icy substrate.
Yesterday, I spent some contorted hours in the attic, balancing in a crouch on angled trusses to route a length of ethernet cable from one side to another. I drilled holes to give mice another couple of potential access points where the cable passes through wall and ceiling boards.
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I plugged the camera in to test my new connections and verified everything worked. The portion remaining involves drilling through the log wall at the peak of the loft ceiling to bring the cable from the repeater inside. Then I need to seal around that cable to prevent mice and bats from taking this new opening as an invitation to come live with us.
Today, I may putter about devising the mount for the camera down at the barn if the roof of the house remains overly hazardous.
I’m hoping the project doesn’t end up waiting until spring like the plan appears to have for digging up the electric supply wires to the barn.
I hope the theme of ‘not finishing’ doesn’t define the year ending today. Without the benefit of reviewing the year in my blog images, this is what comes to mind about the odd-numbered year, 2023:
We spent much of the winter months focused on Cyndie’s convalescence from her ankle reconstruction the previous November. She was functional enough to travel to Puerto Rico in April. In May, we adopted Asher. I did my annual bike trip in June. We made it up to the lake as much as possible through summer. As fall approached, we got the shoulders of the driveway professionally graded and then did the raking and grass seed planting ourselves. Finally, Cyndie opted to go for one more surgery on her ankle and had the metal hardware removed now that the bones had healed.
This morning a meteorologist on the radio announced this December has been the warmest since measurements started being recorded in the 1870s.
We have obviously reached the end of 2023 but I doubt we’ve seen the end of the warming climate’s effects.
Like we always do, I expect we’ll cope one day at a time and respond to whatever 2024 brings with as much love as we can muster.
Celebrate safely tonight all you wild and crazy people! Happy last day of 2023!
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Camera Progress
The testing phase of adding a WiFi surveillance camera to view the horses was completed successfully yesterday. Julian figured out that I needed to get a newer version of the camera software that would recognize the serial number of our new camera. After we installed that fix, the rest of the process went pretty smoothly.
With a cable strung out of a cracked open window in the den and the repeater lying on the roof, we set the camera on a step ladder by the paddock fence.
Swings appeared to supervise the strange activity of us setting up boards teetering in the ladder and stringing extension cords for power.
It worked! Julian selected a camera with pan and tilt features so we will be able to adjust the view to monitor the waterer and portion of both fields as well as the hay shed and driveway. He also used his coding skills to demonstrate a potential option that Cyndie exclaimed would keep her endlessly watching from the comfort of our bed.
We’ll be able to watch the horses on our televisions. The sound of snorting horses reverberated through our subwoofer to our great delight. It’s almost like being there!
Now if we could feed and clean up after them remotely, we could stay in bed all day! Oh, except we also have a dog.
Never mind.
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Days Disappearing
Where are the days going? The minutes and hours of the days following Christmas have disappeared in a blink for me. We have passed the time with little in the way of agendas beyond resting in recovery from the busy holiday activities. Adding a long nap in the middle of the day swallowed a big chunk of time. As has binge-watching a couple of streaming episodes for entertainment.
The weird weather hasn’t been much of a motivator. We are stuck in a pattern of in-between-ism. Not like winter, but well beyond fall.
The ground is so saturated from the recent rain that it seems to resist freezing solidly overnight when the temperature has dropped below 32°F. It gets firmer, but not rock-hard.
Asher has been a little stir-crazy and allowing him to lead on bushwhacks through the woods on a sniff-fari has produced a few obsessive bouts of digging dirt or chewing wood in a hunt for pesky varmints.
Yesterday morning he surprised me with sudden success in rooting a mouse out from its hiding spot. The poor critter wasn’t fast enough to evade his bite when trying to make a run for it.
The horses seem a little tired of the wet and muddy conditions, but maybe that’s a projection on my part. They’ve rolled in it enough times to look particularly rough and ragged.
I suppose the fact that Cyndie has been feeling under the weather the last few days has contributed to our loss of time. We’ve bailed on a plan to head to the lake over New Year’s Day. At the same time, she still soldiers on with projects like dismantling all her Christmas decorations around the house.
I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to connect a new surveillance camera to the software. Multiple attempts to identify the camera by serial number failed, but when I finally tried allowing the software to simply search for it, it successfully found it –identified by serial number. However, the software still wouldn’t connect to the level of displaying an image.
A software professional has offered to stop out and help me this morning. Thank you, Julian.
Once we succeed in connecting to the camera, there is a repeater to install. Getting the Ethernet cable from outside our log home to inside where the router is will be a trick. Then, we can test communicating with the camera when it is located near the barn. When that is achieved, I will need to figure out a way to mount the camera in a location that has AC power and a view beneath the overhang as well as out into the paddocks.
It’s obvious to me that these activities will swiftly disappear more hours and days from my life. Before we know it, it will be next year.
December, I hardly knew thee.
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Learn
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don’t worry
they said
as if it would help
which it did
simply by not hurting
toward the start of a war
to end all wars
even if it didn’t
and decades passed
people understand
some do the right thing
wars come to an end
for a while anyway
then threaten again
as if
humans will never learn
to forgive
live in love
to save ourselves
to have enough sense
to pay our tab
before it gets
beyond our reach
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Messy Mire
The previous few days of rain and record-high temperatures have created a muddy mess in the paddocks. It really makes me miss the years when it didn’t rain in the winter.
I found skid marks in the big paddock that revealed one of the horses slid on all four hooves for a length of about four feet. I assume one of them had started to bolt and then tried to slam on the brakes. Thank goodness they all looked fine when we arrived to serve their evening feed.
The soupy surface was as hard for me to walk through as it was for that horse that had tried to stop. Luckily, the four of them calmed down significantly after a few minutes of munching feed. I was able to focus on the art of picking up manure around them that was virtually inseparable from mud sliding into the tined scoop.
I have a feeling the horses and I will share the feeling of relief when conditions change in some way that will to put an end to the sloppy mire. I am imagining the ground finally getting covered in clean, white snow.
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Holiday Outing
Christmas 2023 is now a memory. Let’s get on with celebrating the new year and start preparing for Valentine’s Day. But before we go, how about one more glance at our festive holiday outing at CHS Field in St. Paul?
We went to the GLOW Holiday Festival on Christmas eve eve with Barry and Carlos and our friends, Paul and Beth.
The rain held off long enough for us to walk among the lights, features, and several thousand other people without getting wet.
The event added much-needed holiday spirit in the absence of snow this year. There were so many photo-worthy spectacles and selfie-hungry couples and families, that much of the time was spent dodging becoming an incidental photo bomber or waiting for a turn to get photo-bombed.
We unexpectedly ran into our friends, the Williams family among the throngs of strangers while strolling the concourse. That increased the festive energy of our evening in a most wonderful way.
There was barely a line when we came upon Santa Claus, so posing with him became a must-do.
Confusion broke out when two overly excited youngsters spotted him and moved in as if pulled by an invisible force. Our group quickly encouraged the kids to go ahead of us while the parents, unaware, were trying to remind the kids about the good manners of waiting their turn.
As Cyndie and I stepped up for our chance to tell Santa what we wanted for Christmas, I leaned in and whispered in his ear, “They aren’t paying you enough for this.” It triggered the most wonderful knowing laugh from him that I felt as if my work was done for the night.
24 hours later, Cyndie and I were gathered with our kids, the Friswold family, and their relations at a party room of Friendship Village for the annual Friswold/Brolin Christmas Eve dinner. Christmas morning brought the Friswolds all together in Cyndie’s mom’s suite for breakfast and gift opening. In the evening, we met again, this time at Ben’s house for games and dinner.
I’m looking forward to a day after the holiday that should bring a return to our usual routine and an end to the over-saturation of Christmas music for a while. Maybe things will get so normal that we even receive some snow that covers the ground for more than a few days.
A guy can dream.
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Ancestor Cloud
I made a word cloud that includes 5 generations of surnames of our children’s ancestors. That is 64 names: 2 parents; 4 grandparents; 8 great-grandparents; 16 great-great-grandparents; and 32 great-great-great-grandparents.
The name Hays occurs 5 times but there are only 4 Friswolds because that name changed from Frisvold four generations back. Cyndie’s mother’s and my mother’s maiden names show up 4 times each.
Our kids are all those people. I’m only half of the people named and Cyndie is the other half.
The kids visited yesterday for our immediate family Christmas gathering and I was mentioning how different from each other Cyndie and I are. Julian then pointed out, “And I am both of you.”
We definitely contain multitudes.
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Pitiful Disarray
I was thinking about titling this post, “Hot Mess” but felt it might not be the best use of the phrase. I did a little research and found that ‘Hot Mess’ describes something in pitiful disarray. That fit even better.
I was teasing Cyndie that her Christmas present from me this year is my completing a long overdue house maintenance task. Our usual routine is to buy a joint treat like an expensive, fancy vacuum or other long-married couple versions of a handy appliance.
The light fixture over our dining room table has been limping along with old compact fluorescent bulbs and two randomly intermittent lightbulb bases. I tried a couple of times to analyze what appeared to be a loose connection in one arm of the fixture but I could never figure out how to get access to where the wires connect.
Fixing it always got pushed aside because I didn’t know which circuit breaker needed to be flipped. Also, working on a light fixture without electricity in a dark area of our house would require setting up supplemental lighting. It doesn’t take much to trigger my skills at procrastination.
Well, Ho-Ho-Ho, this Santa’s elf got past all the excuses yesterday and dove into the project with some tricks up his sleeve. I had done some shopping on my recent trek to the Cities.
This brings me to the hot mess… Do you want to know why I didn’t know which circuit breaker controls this particular light fixture? I present to you, exhibit A:
Speaking of pitiful disarray, the original electrician doing the labeling didn’t do himself proud, and every modifier since has only made things miserably worse. Part of me thinks I should have long ago cleaned up the chart with clearly legible and easily interpreted references, but a larger part of me notices we’ve gotten along well enough thus far with things just the way they are.
When do you usually need to flip a circuit breaker? After it has tripped. Those are pretty easy to find. The hard part is when you want to cut power to something via a circuit breaker. That’s more of a challenge, but the need to do that is so rare, it hasn’t significantly forced the issue. That complication actually serves as a feature for a procrastinator.
For the record, the dining room chandelier circuit breaker is position 9. I flipped most of the single pole breakers, one at a time, and hollered up to Cyndie to find out if the light was still on.
With the power cut, I was able to reverse-engineer the assembly features of the fixture and tighten everything up snugly. While I was at it, I threw in a bonus of a new switch on the wall which included a slider for dimming the new LED bulbs I bought to replace the old CFL bulbs.
Next time Cyndie works on an art project on that table she will finally be able to clearly see what she is doing.
If I knew what the rest of the circuit breakers controlled, I would make a new chart for the panel, but figuring that out can wait a little bit longer…
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Silk Scarves
During December, I’ve been enjoying the privilege of a front-row seat for an art project by one of Santa’s loveliest elves. I didn’t even know that painting silk scarves was a thing. Cyndie manufactured a rig to suspend the scarves so she could draw on designs before filling them with wonderful brushed colors.
Each one is unique and custom-designed for the person she was thinking about. I wish I had taken more pictures when she was doing the painting but I was hesitant due to the hush-hush nature of the project.
Wednesday night she and her friends celebrated with a holiday dinner and an exchange of gifts so I have now been granted permission to share some clips of the finished scarves.
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It brings me so much joy to see how Cyndie has been experimenting with different techniques to bring about beautiful artistic images with a variety of media. These silk scarves look really great. I love how she managed to mix a whimsical energy with an almost business-like calmness worthy of silk.
I’m very familiar with Cyndie’s artistry in the kitchen but her increasing proficiency in producing creative art from many different methods is showing me a whole new side of her. It thrills me to no end.
It shouldn’t surprise me that Cyndie continues to master new accomplishments, but her artistic creativity of late has. Her art projects since retiring stand out in contrast with her previous lifetime of more academic pursuits. Instead of cramming a world of ideas into reports and professional articles, she is now letting them flow freely into shapes and colors.
I am truly honored to have the pleasure of watching her work and then being able to gaze upon the finished pieces. I’m so happy when she allows me to share samples with the rest of you here.
I wonder what she will find to tackle next. You can bet I will strive to take more pictures during the messy phases.
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Relative Something 