Archive for December 2023
Old Schoolmates
Last night, I traveled back in time with a small gathering of guys I went to high school with. It’s an annual holiday event of simply showing up at a designated establishment at a given hour for beverages and a few hours of catching up and recalling escapades from our youth.
Sort of a tiny fraction of a high school reunion. Certainly much easier to plan and pull off. We met at Fat Pants Brewery in Eden Prairie.
It is a little crazy-making for me because it is usually the only time I see most of them in a year. My connection with them is from when we were teenagers, so that remains my mental reference, while I am looking at us all in our mid-60s. I can’t deny having several conversations about our age, health, ailments, and end-of-life contemplations.
When reaching the point in life where it becomes obvious that one is closer to death than to one’s birth, health conversations flow rather naturally.
These are people who I ran with across old people’s lawns and got yelled at (metaphorically), and now we are the ones telling kids to get off our lawn, so to speak. While hanging out with this bunch, I felt a certain appreciation for our shared experience of growing up without cell phones. These are my people, regardless all our variety of differences.
One thing that I’m struggling to comprehend after our visit is what the heck happened to us all between the 1970s and 2023. I’m afraid it’s mostly all a blur. Somewhere in there we raised kids and worked careers but it almost seems like just incidental anecdotes at this point.
After several hours passed in a blink, holiday greetings were exchanged, and one by one we headed back into our real worlds for another year. Something about that feeds my yearning to be able to participate in this ritual each December.
It’s a little adventure of stepping out of our present lives and spending a few fleeting moments with older versions of our younger selves one night of the year.
It feels very much like what Christmas is all about.
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Idle Pursuits
Yesterday was a rather quiet week on the Ranch. It probably felt like a week-long day because I chose to accomplish almost nothing industrious or ambitious. I ended the day in the time warp of nighttime broadcast television where there were endless commercials for shows scheduled to happen well in the future between occasional action of the NFL’s Monday Night Football game.
In the afternoon, I accomplished an incredibly luscious nap that included some fascinating dream sequences. Can’t buy that, even during Christmas sales.
I may have accidentally noticed some crazy news headlines that hint at more similarities today to situations occurring in the time before and during WWII than any human should be comfortable tolerating.
From what I keep seeing, plenty of town criers are hollering warnings but nowhere do I find definitive action being taken. Talk is cheap, another world war will be more expensive than any of us want to imagine.
Regarding my brilliant idea to have people smarter than me come to mark the power wires leading to the barn, I learned they don’t do “private” lines, only public utilities.
I’m back to my own ingenuity but it won’t happen until the ground re-thaws again in the next few days. The last two nights brought us hard freezes and yesterday the temps didn’t climb anywhere near thawing.
I’ve put away my jigsaw puzzles to make room on the big table for craft projects. One of Santa’s elves is knocking herself out with above and beyond effort making beautiful toys for girls and boys.
It’s the holiday season 🎶
And Santa Claus is coming ‘round
I won’t continue with those lyrics because the next line has something to do with Christmas snow and I don’t want to lie.
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Still Cooking
Since the little green caterpillar is still crawling around, I shouldn’t be surprised that the organisms that breakdown manure into dirt continue to do their thing. This time of year my compost piles are usually dormant but I’ve currently got one that is steaming away, active as ever.
We received a little bit of rain overnight Friday into Saturday and that, combined with the above-freezing temperatures, has created sloppy footing in the paddocks. The significant weight of horses provides a pretty good indicator of how thawed the ground gets. Instead of the ground being packed down by their hooves, it becomes dotted with hoof-sized potholes.
Just for the record, when the weather turns back to freezing, the pockmarked surface becomes rock-hard and that wreaks havoc on my attempts to scoop manure. At that point, I just hope for snow to cover the ground for the season so I can just let it all lay until spring.
It’s weird how easy it is to get used to not having snow on the ground. It will require a mental adjustment when winter weather finally arrives and I have to shift into shoveling and plowing mode. I fear I’m being lulled into a nonchalance that will demand more than a little effort to overcome.
Alas, that is a bridge to be crossed at another time. This is the moment I should be focused on.
Yesterday I puttered around with a curiosity about locating the spot where digging for the power cable to the barn needs to happen. The warm weather has me wanting to deal with it sooner than next spring. I tried poking a wire for a while and then got the bright idea I should just call the “Call Before You Dig!” number and have a skilled professional mark the entire route between the shop and the barn.
Of course, you know what will happen as soon as it gets marked. Yes, we’ll finally get that snow cover I’ve been waiting for.
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Just Before
The proverbial expression “it’s always darkest before the dawn” is commonly heard in reference to tough times but what about when you are standing out in the woods all night long? Well, since dawn is the first appearance of light before sunrise then it makes sense that it would be darkest at that point.
Maybe there deserves to be a phrase for the moment just before the sun becomes visible on the horizon. It’s well after dawn but not yet sunrise. That is when we get some truly spectacular sky views around here.
From one color extreme to the next, these two images were captured just days apart.
It’s always frequently occasionally the most interesting or colorful just before the sun rises above the horizon.
Thank goodness for a wide-open view to the east every morning.
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Where’s Winter?
Warmth continues to dominate our weather patterns halfway through December. A headline in the paper this morning boldly reads, “Historic El Niño could be the strongest in 75 years.” Well, I’ll be.
Yesterday morning, I hurried to retrieve the garbage bin in advance of the arrival of the electrician(s) who were going to diagnose my loss of power in the barn.
I hastily parked the bin on the asphalt just beyond the turnoff to the barn and returned to tending to the horses. As minutes dragged on toward an hour of waiting, I returned to the house and took the bin with me, thinking that would result in the electricians showing up.
When that didn’t work, I went back out again and at the spot where I had temporarily left the garbage bin, I spotted something bright green on the ground. Thinking it might be a plastic piece of the bin, I bent down to pick it up. To my surprise, it moved, curling into a circle.
A caterpillar! In December!? Yikes. Me thinks our environment is reflecting the continued warming of the planet. The little guy didn’t even have a wooly coat on. Whatever trees or plants it consumes will be under greater pressure if creatures that feed on them don’t die off over winter. How is the caterpillar not freezing when the temperature drops overnight?
The guys eventually showed up nearly two hours after the expected time and quickly deduced the power is being lost somewhere underground between the shop and the barn. Two clues point toward likely possibilities.
There was a pile of disturbed dirt from a burrowing critter in the barn below the circuit breaker box where the pipe of wires comes out of the ground. There is also a known splice in the wires from 11 years ago when a skid steer cut them during the making of a drive-able thoroughfare around the back of the barn.
With the ground frozen enough to make digging difficult, revealing the status of that splice may need to wait until next spring. The ground inside the barn wasn’t solid like a rock, so I took a crack at digging in there.
I made it down to the bottom of the pipe and quit when there was no evidence of burrowing down that far. The wires are barely visible at the bottom of the hole and appear free of damage.
To help us out until I can dig for the splices, the electricians rearranged circuit breakers so they all connect to the single phase of 120V AC available. Power usage in the barn isn’t high enough to overload one phase and we aren’t currently using 240V for anything so this works for now.
Whatever failed on the one line could just as easily occur on the remaining line so this is something we want to fix even though the temporary solution is providing everything we need for now.
Since winter isn’t delivering its worst this year, maybe I’ll find an opportunity to dig outside sooner rather than later. However, I’m hesitant about making a big digging mess that I wouldn’t be able to clean up until much later and it didn’t sound like the electricians were very interested in repairing the splice during the winter months (hoping that truly is the problem).
Most likely, we’ll wait and see.
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Missing Phase
So, yesterday I wrote about the stability I have enjoyed throughout my life. That would include infrastructure, which isn’t exactly what I was referring to in my rambling sermon. When it snows, our roads get plowed. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I toggle a switch, the lights come on. Except when they don’t.
My current perception of stability was rocked on Tuesday when I flipped the two switches for lights in the barn and only one set came on. I’ve seen incidences where a circuit breaker fails. That would be easy for me to fix.
It’s not the circuit breaker. It is something I cannot fix. One of the phases of 120V AC coming into the master circuit breaker in the electrical box in the barn is no longer live. Zero voltage.
Since the source of this power is after or beyond our electric co-op’s meter, they do not provide service. That falls on their members to contact an electrician for help. The person I spoke with at the co-op was as helpful as possible in providing information to aid me in deciding what to do next.
The most unsettling thing I learned was that burrowing critters do indeed contribute to underground electrical line failures. He said that when cable insulation gets chewed to expose conductors, the wires can begin to corrode and eventually even turn to dust.
As a result of that, he told me the co-op now runs wires through piping between transformers and homes when doing new installations. Doing so has significantly reduced these kinds of problems.
Lovely.
What are our chances of finding an electrician who happens to have time to just show up when we call?
Well, pretty good, actually. The first company I contacted said “Joe” would call me back as soon as he had a moment. Based on previous experience, I fought my fears that I wouldn’t hear from him for days, if at all.
Cyndie encouraged me to send him love in advance. I sent the whole company love.
An hour or two later, I got the call and he immediately asked if it was a dairy barn and whether it was urgent, or not. When I admitted it wasn’t urgent but we did have horses and the power keeps their water from freezing, he said they would come out first thing in the morning.
We couldn’t be more pleased about that.
Does it work if we send the underground electric cable love?
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Hard Imaginings
Looking back on stories I’ve been told about things that happened before I was born, it occurs to me that I’ve lived through a relatively long period of stability. Thankfully, the U.S. Civil War and the two World Wars didn’t end the United States.
I was four years old when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Too young to comprehend the full depth of such political turmoil. From my perspective, the world continued rather seamlessly.
My childhood occurred during the years my country was fighting the war in Vietnam. I was too young to be drafted into military service. I recall being occasionally aware of the risk, but my life was mostly insulated from any dramatic impact of the war. There were reports on the television news about casualties and protests, but as a kid, most of that drama went over my head.
My world involved stepping out our front door to hop on my bike and ride around the neighborhood to see who was outside forming a game of baseball, football, or kick-the-can. The first movie I saw that was rated “M” for Mature in a theater was, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1969.
Throughout my life, I developed a naive sense of normalcy about my country. I trusted the local, state, and federal governments to maintain law and order. It was easy to turn a blind eye to our interference in other countries and abuses of power at home. I felt the truth would eventually come out and miscreants would be brought to justice.
I’ve lived a comfortable life. Even when the riots in Minneapolis broke out after George Floyd was murdered by police officers, my property was not at risk. Slowly, things calm and people return to their usual routines.
Is it possible now that the democratic system of government the United States has been operating under since declaring independence from foreign nations is at risk of failure from within? It appears the citizens of this country have shifted significantly from a time when there was broad agreement over who our enemies were, foreign and domestic.
Imagine if we suddenly lost our right to freedom of speech against an authoritarian ruler. The kid in me can’t reconcile how anyone in this country would accept for one second a politician who holds anything but contempt for dictators or communist leaders.
After watching the chilling apocalyptic thriller, “Leave the World Behind” on Netflix, it occurred to me that the majority of average people will have a very hard time on their own in influencing greater society if our government collapses. It is easy to see how things could devolve to every family (or person) for themselves.
It is my hope that the year 2024 will find a vast majority of U.S. citizens coming together to overwhelmingly dispatch any candidate who doesn’t honestly and seriously support our democracy with freedom of the press, equality for all, separation of church and state, and ultimately, liberty and justice for all.
Next November, vote to preserve democracy. Kleptocrats, grifters, and wanna-be dictators need not apply.
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Getting Coffee
We are not comedians and are not in cars but I’d like to pretend you and I are out together for coffee just like Jerry and his guests on his internet series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” I’ve been binging the series lately and it’s got me missing the days of idle banter with my various accomplices in the fine art of waxing lyrical about all manner of minutiae.
I would describe the futility of cleaning hay bale shrapnel out of winter boots.
When a new pair of boots I ordered arrived recently, I struggled to decide what to do with the old pair. They had been repaired once, but now the rubber base was cracked and ripping away from the upper leather. Feeling they were beyond repair, Cyndie advised me to throw them in the trash.
The laces were worth saving, so I pulled them out. That helped me to notice the leather was in really good shape and could be used for some future project, I was sure. I decided to cut the threads holding the leather to the rubber.
That is when I discovered how much of the nooks and crannies were filled with hay remnants. That new consciousness led me to try to empty my new boots yesterday after hauling nine bales from the hay shed over to the barn.
After dumping all the hay out of one of the new boots, I took a picture to convey the futility of trying to get it all.
A while back, I wrote about how the horses, Swings and Light, drool food over each other’s heads when they eat close beside each other. Yesterday afternoon, Asher and I showed up at the barn after Cyndie had finished serving up the feed.
Cyndie described the challenge of getting the filled buckets clipped to hang as quickly as the horses preferred. She decided to let Swings have a first and then she bent over to hook the handle of the bucket. Do you see where this is headed?
She said, “Now I have a bunch of slobbered feed pellets down my neck.”
While Asher and I were making our way along the north loop trail I was impressed by the power of the low-angled winter sunshine to melt snow despite our daytime temperature remaining below freezing all day.
Is it obvious which direction is south? In the picture, Asher is facing the direction of the setting sun. It never gets high enough to shine on the whole path, but the areas that receive direct sunlight are completely clear of snow.
Based on the present weather forecast, the rest of the snow doesn’t stand much chance, even in the shade. Temperatures will rise well above freezing for the next few days.
By the way, I don’t drink coffee. Make mine a chai latte and bring on the humorous back-and-forth wisecracking about our perceptions of this crazy world in which we live.
Say goodbye, John.
“See ya later, gator!”
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Lap Dog
Weighing in at somewhere between 75-80 pounds, we don’t think of Asher as a lap dog. Especially, because he shows little interest in climbing up to sit on our laps. However, he seems to feel differently when he finds visitors sitting down.
Our kids stopped by on Sunday and Asher climbed up to sit on Julian.
Since that doesn’t happen very often, we captured the novel moment with a photo. It was just so cute. Little did we know, it would get even more photo-worthy.
I hadn’t been paying attention until Julian mentioned his legs were starting to fall asleep.
Asher was out cold, sprawled across the arm of the chair and Julian’s legs. Cyndie has tried many times without success to entice Asher to lie down by her to share his warmth. Silly dog.
Speaking of silly, I gave Asher full freedom to dig for something that was really captivating his nose. I’m glad there weren’t any buried cables in the vicinity. He chewed through roots and dug, and dug.
I wish I knew what he was smelling that interested him so much. Ultimately, he came up with nothing but dirt.
All that digging appeared to tire him out but still, he showed no interest in resting on our laps when we got back inside.
Maybe we should refer to him as being a selective lap dog.
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Relative Something 