Archive for January 2024
Unusual Winter
Once again, our hero finds himself writing about the weather. I’m sorry, I can’t help myself. Most people on the planet are, by this time, well aware the climate is in transition, so it’s probably not big news that January 29, 2024, was so uncharacteristically warm where I live. However, for me to open the door and hear songbirds singing, see flying insects swarming, and feel the lack of cold air hitting our faces, it makes my head spin. Truly. It’s disorienting.
This is how it looked outside yesterday afternoon:
In January! No snowshoes required. There is a snowmobile club that grooms a trail along the edge of our property. In the fall they drive the trail on ATVs and pound in signs to mark the way. That trail got marked but we never received enough snow to groom and not a single sled has passed by.
The extremity of our warm winter doesn’t grab attention like out-of-control wildfires or destructive flooding that has ravaged other parts of the world but it feels rather alarming to me. Not that being alarmed will have much impact on the rate at which people of the world continue to pump greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere.
I wish I could avoid ever flying in a conventional commercial jet or driving a gas-burning car anymore but that’s not likely to happen. I wish I never bought anything plastic ever again. My lifestyle has yet to shift to perfect environmental stewardship and I don’t foresee a strong enough change in my behavior to solve the dilemma any time soon. I just add a little more personal guilt each time I start the car and roll out of our driveway.
Around these parts, there are a lot of folks who plan on winter income from plowing snow for businesses and homeowners. Store owners sell snow-clearing machines and tools. Companies sell snowmobiles, skis, snowboards, sleds, and skates. Experts will likely tally the numbers and report on the financial hardships faced by all the people who make their living from the winter activities that used to be ubiquitous in the region. My heart goes out to them.
On the flip side of that situation, I will offer no complaints about the lower expense of keeping our house warm, the minimal amount of shoveling and plowing I’ve needed to do thus far, and how easy the conditions have been for the horses.
There remain a few oak trees I was planning to trim but I’m wondering if the thaw makes doing so ill-advised. That’s usually one of my January/February projects. This year, nothing’s usual about our winter.
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Time Flying
It’s not as if anything is guaranteed to turn out the way I expect. I’ve been exercising my opportunity to explore being idle lately between sessions of walking Asher and tending to the horses. No agenda. No goals. Occasional spontaneous naps. A few streaming series, a random movie here and there, a lot of listening to music, watching suggested YouTube videos, and meandering down the rabbit hole of Reddit comments on news or popular posts.
There are plenty of ways to visit worlds completely foreign to my reality. Did you know there are still people who discuss everything that a certain defendant-in-chief says or does? It’s weird how stark the difference is between reading news from other places compared to standing out among our four horses.
Yesterday was the “final four” day for NFL playoffs. This morning there are fans for two of the teams who couldn’t be happier and fans of the other two teams coping with a heaping serving of dashed hopes. I feel their pain.
On the subject of spectator sports, last week, Major League Baseball announced the 2024 Hall of Fame election results. This has provided a stark reference for the passing of time in my life. Twin Cities hometown superstar, Joe Mauer was voted in on the first year he made the ballot. He was born about a year and a half after Cyndie and I got married.
A couple of blinks later, Joe was winning batting titles, Golden Glove awards, MVP awards, and All-Star appearances, all while playing for one team: his home state Minnesota Twins. The next thing I know, he has retired from playing baseball. Now he is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. His entire career seems like just a blip of time to me.
As a kid who grew up with a sports fan dad, I looked up to athletes and their impressive accomplishments as permanent fixtures. Then one day I noticed the lauded draftees and excelling rookies making headlines were younger than me. At least Hall of Famers were still older.
Not anymore.
Time sure flies when you are having fun.
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Snow Shortage
There are plenty of reasons I lament the disappearance of snow, especially when it happens in JANUARY! Obviously, the inability to make a decent igloo is high among them but the onset of melty temperatures brings an additional complication. As the ground softens in the paddocks, we enter mud-saster season. For a period of time at the end of snow season, being able to scrub boots clean on the way to the house after horse chores is a real plus.
Too bad the mud always outlasts the snow. By all indications, we will likely lose the majority of our snow-cone-quality crystals by the end of today. A few stray piles will remain along the edges of areas shoveled or plowed which will allow for scraping boots. They become treasured resources for a dwindling few days.
It’s little things like this that we allow to make special moments in otherwise routine days.
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Ice Growth
With overnight temperatures hovering close to freezing during this January thaw, we are waking to interesting conditions outside. The most notable surface has been the asphalt driveway. Yesterday, instead of the smooth glaze that occurred the day before, we experienced alien-looking ice formations peppering the pavement. It made walking interesting because some areas were simply wet while others were surprisingly slippery.
As so often happens, capturing the full visual impact of the ice shapes by way of a photograph is a no match for the naked eye but that rarely stops one from trying.
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After just a few hours, the driveway surface changes to just being wet. I’ve read that our winter weather is becoming much more like what happens in places 500-600 miles (800-965 km) south of here. This sure isn’t the winter weather I remember from back when I was a kid.
Above is a view of our place’s appearance on January 25 this year. I don’t like the non-winter-like weather but I am counting our blessings that we have, up to this point, been free of climate-related wildfires or floods. Our growing season is getting longer, we are saving money on heating the house, and I haven’t had to shovel or plow much snow. All good, no? Well, we are always at risk of getting hit with extreme downpours, high winds, hail, and tornados since storms are becoming more intense.
Some strange ice growth on the driveway in the morning is hardly problematic. We find it rather interesting, although it’s hard to do it justice in photos.
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Blessed Calm
While it lasts, we are currently enjoying the blessings of calm serenity with the horses. The temperatures have softened, blankets have been removed, no illnesses or injuries to speak of, and all four have settled into a smooth routine of eating their feed out of hanging buckets.
Yesterday, they even got all of their hooves trimmed without incident. Cyndie was away for the day and I was responsible for getting each of them into their halters. For the first time in my experience, not one of them backed off and made me try multiple times for cooperation. Each horse stood firm and allowed me to fumble with straps, latches, and my limited reach around their tall necks.
I think they were being nice for my sake.
They have also been behaving surprisingly well at feeding times. The four of them take up positions in the spots they originally chose for their feed buckets, with only an occasional need for us to coax some relocating.
It is particularly rewarding on days when they step up in advance and calmly await their buckets. That usually coincides with no-fuss eating, devoid of shenanigans or excess spillage.
It’s a scenario where everyone wins.
While things are all well and good with the horses, our dog Asher has gotten himself into a little trouble at the doggie daycare place. We’ve been happy about him having somewhere to occasionally go where he could interact with other dogs and free us for a few hours. He has spoiled that with a second offense of not playing well with others at the place in Hudson.
As a result of his aggression against another dog yesterday, he has been banished for good from the facility.
Not everything was as calm as it seemed.
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Glazed Asphalt
The smooth black surface of our driveway is great for melting snow that remains after plowing. It’s not so great when moisture condenses overnight and freezes. We need to get a sign that warns, “Slippery When Glazed!”
Luckily, the warmth visiting our region as the day progressed made that glaze disappear entirely. We lost more snow on Sunday than yesterday but the trend is obvious and feeds itself. Each day we get above freezing will advance the evaporation to greater degrees (pun intended).
On a day over the previous weekend when the clouds weren’t as opaque, I captured this view directly overhead:
A cloud gazers delight. Do you see the dolphin? I’m intrigued by the contrast of shadowed clouds compared to the ones glowing bright white. I wonder what it looked like from the window of an airplane flying close to the same elevation.
Not much sky watching happening when walking on our driveway in the morning hours. Waddling along like penguins are we.
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Remembering Mischief
Scanning headlines yesterday, I saw the following from NBC News: “Fake Joe Biden robocall tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote on Tuesday.” My first thought was to personalize it and wonder if I would fall for a fake robocall telling me to do, or not do, anything. Who goes through the effort to create such a scam and do they think it will succeed in whatever it is they are hoping to accomplish?
Foreign rabble-rousers probably hoping to sow seeds of doubt in U.S. elections. Good-for-nothing troublemakers, whoever they are.
Now, I’m not entirely innocent when it comes to clever shenanigans. There was a time when I took great pleasure in using the lowest-tech of kluges to pull off my own –I think harmless– ruses.
My siblings may remember when I made a copy of a legitimate news article on the subject of Frito-Lay products and altered the wording to claim Frito corn chips smell like dirty socks. We were on a road trip together and the subject had come up in one of our conversations. Don’t ask. I don’t even remember the details, anyway.
Everyone knows it’s true, that is what Fritos smell like. Especially if you’re not the one eating them. But it’s not something you expect to read in the Business section of a newspaper. That’s why I thought it would be hilarious to tweak the article by altering one sentence and creating believable evidence supporting the assertions I posed in that road trip conversation.
They didn’t buy it. None of them fell for my keenly crafted perfection in matching the font.
Didn’t change the truth, though. Dirty socks. Go ahead, try to eat some Fritos without thinking of that now.
For some reason, a different font-matching ruse from my past is the first memory that came up after thinking about the robocalls yesterday. The company I worked for in the 1980s and 90s came up with a contest for the employees. It was a treasure hunt of sorts with a series of clues provided over time. I don’t recall the reason for the “adventure-tainment,” but it could easily have been an HR idea for team-building or a morale boost of some sort.
Doesn’t matter. I was eager to solve the puzzle for my group of Engineers and we gobbled up the clues to combine our analytical skills and beat everyone to the prize. Our critical sleuthing led us to a cover over an air vent but there was no new clue there. I figured other treasure hunters might come to a similar conclusion and look in that same place.
I knew where the gold paper used for clues was stored so I decided we should make a fake clue and leave it for others to find in hopes of leading them astray. Once again I used my novice font-matching skills in hopes of making the game more interesting.
Except that the game didn’t get interesting. As far as we knew, nobody ever looked for that fake clue. I was so entertained by messing with the game that I think I lost interest in the real clues. Somebody else found the treasure. We went back to thinking about what we were supposed to be working on.
A fun memory. At least my mischief wasn’t aimed at destroying democracies. Don’t fall for fake Biden robocalls!
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Still Life
I’m not always looking at the sky for photo subjects. This solitary leaf on the thinly snow-covered driveway made for a good still-life image.
Back indoors, I spotted the collection of zippers on my layers of winter wear in the mirror.
In the barn, we are down to the last bag of feed, which is in glaring contrast to the stack of feed that usually covers that pallet.
I sent this picture to our handler at This Old Horse to remind her we were due for delivery and since she was coming on Wednesday for a hoof trimming appointment, the timing would be just right. Cyndie was gone overnight Saturday and offered to tend to the horses in the evening yesterday since I was watching NFL playoff games. When Cyndie noticed the last bag, she took a picture and sent it to our TOH handler, as well.
Oops. How’s that for classic husband and wife failure to communicate with each other about this kind of thing? I meant to tell Cyndie that I’d checked in but I was too late. When I told her, she said she had done the same thing: taken a picture of the last bag and texted our handler. The reply informed Cyndie that I had already sent the same picture.
Great minds think alike, though, eh?
For good measure, I’ll throw in one of my classic filled-frame close-ups featuring the texture of tree bark from our woods.
In reality, there was very little that was still around our place yesterday with winds blowing between 12-20 mph most of the day. That’s the way warmer air arrives in January, on winds blowing in from the south.
I should be able to keep my complaints to a minimum, thank you very much.
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Relative Something 