Archive for May 2024
Slight Pause
As my body arrived upon day 5 of my COVID experience, the vital signs of temperature and oxygen saturation were back to my healthy normal. I executed the majority of my routine of core strength poses and stretches, dressed for the day, and enjoyed a full breakfast that Cyndie had prepared.
I was ready to go, except for one significant thing. I had no “get up and go.”
It wasn’t that I lacked confidence I could step out and fill another day with chores. It was that I lacked any impulse to do, well, anything.
I felt zero motivation—a complete absence of momentum.
In that case, returning to recline on my bed seemed like an appropriate response. The intangible aspects of a COVID-19 infection are worthy of our respect. I’ll give the prescription medication another day to do its thing.
I allowed my body at rest to remain at rest for the majority of a beautiful day.
As the afternoon faded into the dinner hour, I noticed the summery sounds of our surroundings serenading on an intoxicating breeze beyond the screen door.
Despite a minor PTSD flashback of an unsettling encounter evicting a rather large eastern fox snake wrapped around the entry of one side of the shop garage door the day before, I stepped out onto the deck to inhale the fresh air.
I had considered not writing about my having been infected with COVID-19 but I wasn’t sure where that inclination was coming from. I shamelessly share almost everything else about myself.
Having done so, I now appreciate the messages of support and well-wishes I’ve received. Thank you, both of you.
Just teasing. It’s been more than two. Getting better takes time. Feeling better is a process related to getting better. Support from others is a good prescription for feeling better.
I am definitely feeling better. Yesterday will be registered as a slight pause in the return to regular physical duties.
There are so many others who have experienced far more severe illnesses than me as a result of this virus (or lost their lives to it), it occurs to me that maybe I didn’t feel the descriptions of my experience deserved the column space. I’ve also heard plenty of tales about folks who tested positive but didn’t even know they had it.
One thing for certain, I’ve lost the bragging right of never having Covid. I’m booted from the club that thinks they have some magic natural immunity. For now, I am still able to boast of only having it one time.
I will frame this as having been just a slight pause in my otherwise surprisingly good ongoing health.
“Full speed ahead, immune system!”
“Aye aye, Captain. All systems go!”
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Plans Obliterated
As soon as my health took a turn for the better, I began to care about all the events my illness has forced us to cancel. While I was feeling miserable, I didn’t care about anything but enduring the misery. I completely missed out on watching the NBA Minnesota Timberwolves blow out the Denver Nuggets by 45 points on Thursday night.
Good thing I was feeling better last night so I could watch them score their lowest first-half points for the entire season. I suffer that terrible fan affliction in spectator sports. The games I’m able to see my teams play are too often lousy and the ones I miss are the ones that turn out great.
Turned out last night’s game was one of the rare exceptions of that theme. Biggest game 7 comeback in NBA history. Whaaat?!! Go Wolves!
Cyndie and I lost the opportunity for a dinner out with family on Friday night and then a 100th-anniversary event at one of our old hometown schools on Saturday. Brunch with friends on Sunday was a bust.
Most frustrating, my plan to mow some portion of our property every day during the season of fastest growth suddenly came to an abrupt halt. That meant more than four days of unchecked grass blade growth.
I got out of bed yesterday morning, took a shower to wash a couple of days of fever off of me, and put on my work clothes. It was time to mow.
After a few days of feeling too sick to care, I carried some of that absence of concern forward with the difficulty of mowing tall grass. Tossing away my usual perfectionistic tendencies, I did my best with a single pass and didn’t let it bug me when the result was downright ugly.
The goal was to get as many of the areas knocked down with what I’ll call a “rough cut” so that I could return in a day or two (pending the rain in our forecast) to mow another time to my usual high standards.
That area in the outflow of the culvert has been so wet this spring that I couldn’t cut it until now. Too bad now it is too tall for my lawnmowers. However, we do have other tools to choose from. This area will get the power trimmer treatment. The good thing about the string trimmer is that it cuts just fine even when the grass is a little wet.
For the rest of the week, I’m making no plans to have anything go as planned.
Recovery Underway
I’ve heard many times that there are people who are asymptomatic despite testing positive for COVID. You get it, but you don’t get it. That seems weird. I had imagined that my vaccinations and booster shots would ward off the virus even if I got exposed, though I knew there was no guarantee.
Well, I got it and was slammed by symptoms quickly enough to warrant taking the in-home test and alerting my doctor. He prescribed Paxlovid, but with a caveat that if insurance didn’t cover a high cost for the medication he would support me in just riding out the virus with home treatments.
The nurse who checked me in on the phone appointment warned that subsidies were ending for Paxlovid and it could cost as much as $1200. I logged into my insurance account and initiated a chat to check on the cost. With my annual deductible at $8000, an amount I had barely come close to meeting, I could expect the price to be $1334.60.
That information was enough for me to plan to ride it out. My second night was pretty brutal and had me considering spending the money. In the morning, an email in my inbox from the pharmacy said my prescription was ready at a price of $379.60. Maybe the subsidy was still in play. I was all in at that price.
I don’t know if it was coincidental timing but my fever broke by the end of the day of my first dose.
Things are headed in the right direction. I’m giving my mind and body a “positive thinking” boost to maintain the healthy momentum.
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Feeling Lousy
Not feeling much like writing today. Had a high fever Thursday night at the lake. Drove home yesterday morning and took a COVID test. I registered positive. This is the first time I have tested positive. Wish I could have been one of those who never experienced any symptoms.
I’m feeling pretty lousy. Cyndie doesn’t have any symptoms and tested negative so we are desperately trying to keep it that way. Suddenly, any plans we had before are now being thoroughly disrupted.
It’s a whole lotta yuck.
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More Prep
I suffered a rough night’s sleep, ruminating about the difficulties we experienced in getting stones to remain attached to the wall with the miracle substance, “StickyStone.” Cyndie and I decided to add a step to our preparation, hoping to finish the project with a higher rate of success by the end of the day yesterday.
I found some moderately rough sandpaper that we used to flatten high points on the underside of the manufactured stones.
On Wednesday, several of the stones would teeter a little after we pressed them into place and I expect that directly worked against a secure bond between the two surfaces. The rough, uneven texture on the back is probably a plus when using masonry mud on a scratch coat to get things to hold firm. We had chosen a method that allowed me to avoid slapping mud around due to my lack of know-how. (Regardless of how many instructional YouTube videos might exist.)
That last added step of preparation seemed to do the trick. Initially, I expected to have more than enough adhesive, but after making so many second and third attempts on Wednesday, the dwindling supply, identifiable by the ever-shortening rod of the plunger in the gun, had me wishing I’d bought a second tube.
I pushed my luck and doled out the adhesive in increasingly smaller doses as we worked our way around the last corner. We finished with almost nothing left in the tube.
For a before and after comparison, this is what one corner looked like before the log home builders trimmed off the bottom portions that were rotting:
They cut them pretty high and framed up the exposed area with treated lumber. By yesterday afternoon, this shows the change:
I will not attempt to remedy the heaving pavers on the ground that have become more problematic every year. We talked to a professional landscaper yesterday who stopped by for a consultation on dealing with the many interrelated issues contributing to the problems.
It leaves me wanting to go home and deal with problems more within my reach, like trying to knock down lush green grass that gets almost too tall for my mower in just a few days after a previous cut.
The added preparation step for mowing the ridiculously tall grass involves a first pass with the string trimmer in the areas of most difficulty. Somehow, that needs to be achieved without too much delay in getting back to mow areas that haven’t gotten out of control yet.
We definitely need the added hours of daylight we’ve been gaining as the planet hurtles toward the summer solstice next month. It’s getting hard for me to remember those wonderful days of winter when so little demand on my time and attention was a dominating theme.
Ah, those were the days.
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Rock Fitting
On the way to the lake yesterday, we dropped Asher off for his in-residence training and he accepted the unfamiliar surroundings without complaint.
Asher is barely visible in the far pen beyond the front area occupied by a dog he didn’t yet know. He passed by this front dog with a brief check, and receiving no response, he decided to ignore it and move on to sniffing every surface in his pen.
We felt it was a great start. Satisfied Asher was in good hands, we hopped in our car and drove the rest of the way to the lake without him.
While we are up here, we are planning to add a finishing touch to the old cabin where the log guys cut off the bottom of rotting logs in March. Having a large stash of faux rocks at home, we brought some up for the job.
These rocks had spent some time as markers in our labyrinth and as a result, developed a layer of dirt that needed to be removed.
That’s fine. We had some time to spare.
After cleaning them up and spreading the rocks out so we could see them, we tried mocking up the layouts for each space.
It seemed like a good plan to me. We felt encouraged by the process and figured the hard work was all behind us. The next phase involved a new adhesive from Techniseal called Stickystone. It is a fast-setting vertical hardscape adhesive.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well as my test case back at home. A few rocks had fallen off the foundation of the house in Beldenville so I tested the Stickystone to reattach them and it worked with ease.
For some reason that I haven’t figured out, getting the adhesive to hold the rocks in place up here is only successful about half the time. After completing two of the five surfaces, we were using up the limited supply of adhesive too fast and my patience was dwindling.
We had spent so much time cleaning and prepping that the mounting and remounting had pushed us past the dinner hour. We were tired and hungry and I was very frustrated. Our remedy was a trip to Coop’s Pizza for dinner.
If it’s not too rainy this morning, we’ll try hanging more rocks until the adhesive runs out. I will be looking to focus on the outlook that partial progress is better than no progress at all.
Come to think of it, that’s also one way we will be considering Asher’s training while he is away.
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Asher Away
Today we are taking Asher to camp for a twelve-day live-in training experience where he will get time to socialize with other dogs and begin learning lessons wearing an e-collar. It is a new step toward improving Asher’s respect for our commands to him with the ultimate goal of allowing him to roam our property off-leash while obeying the confines of our property borders.
Last night we had a wonderful consultation session in Hudson that introduced Asher to one of the staff who works at the kennel where Asher will be “vacationing.”
Cyndie had contacted these trainers after Asher had received a ban from the doggy daycare place where we’d been taking him for playtime with other dogs. At the time, when the daycare reported Asher was “reactive” to two other dogs, we thought it was a worst outcome. Now, we see it as a good thing because it moved us to this next level of training with skilled professionals.
During yesterday evening’s ‘meet-n-greet,’ we were allowed to sit on the curb and let the trainer handle Asher while a colleague walked two different dogs nearby in a busy parking lot beside a busy street.
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Asher definitely took notice, but the trainer was able to reclaim his attention and continue walking without difficulty.
The next dog was bigger and the handler was playing rambunctiously with it and had her dog bark on command but Asher was nothing more than curious.
At the completion of their exercises, they returned with the verdict that they didn’t see Asher’s behavior as being “reactive.” They described it as being understandably curious.
When we told them the name of the facility that applied the term “reactive” to Asher’s scraps with two different dogs, their response was instantaneous that the level of training of staff at such a location was not of the highest quality. That helped us to give the upsetting news they reported about Asher’s behavior much less weight in our minds.
With this brief exercise with Asher, the trainer has a good idea about an itinerary she and the kennel owner/trainer will plan for the next week and a half at their facility with other dogs that will be on hand.
There are a lot of promising circumstances with our new trainers. The kennel is on the way to our lake place. The trainer we met last night lives very close to us in Ellsworth. She will be able to come to our property after Asher completes his training at the 40-acre kennel property and help us apply the things he learned up there at our home.
She also proposed the possibility of her picking Asher up and taking him to the kennel on future occasions to save us the drive since she would be going there frequently. That would be handy for us in times we weren’t otherwise on the way up to Hayward.
Both trainers last night felt very confident that Asher will be able to learn to respect our commands more reliably and to respect our property borders with more training and his natural maturing.
That speaks well to their confidence that we can be trained to be more effective dog handlers, even at our age.
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Busy Image
Cyndie is a frequent contributor of images for my use, to which I am forever grateful. Most of the time, she offers them without my asking. I’m probably too quick to turn down as many as I do but it feels a bit like cheating sometimes to rely on her efforts too often in place of my own.
I’ve gladly accepted this crazy image she captured of a wolf spider in a bucket of water.
There is so much going on here that catches my eye. The spider is the least mysterious, except for the three bubbles on the feet, however that is happening. Light does interesting things.
The alien-looking creature at the bottom is wonderful. I wouldn’t think to draw that if I needed to come up with a strange-looking alien, but that hint of a face and the outstretched arm are perfect.
It’s hard to tell what is providing the shadows that are the darker blue shapes. I believe the lighter blue is a reflection of the sky.
The hairy-looking sock puppet of a rat’s face on the right appears to be looking at the ripples in the shadow above it. What is making those ripples, anyway?
Cyndie suggested I create a “Words on Images” feature from the picture but there is already so much going on in that photo that I think words would do it a disservice.
The best thing about this picture for me is that I wish I had taken it. That is often what crosses my mind when I see a photo that I thoroughly admire. I wish I had been there to see that.
I’m glad Cyndie captured it and has shared it for all to see. I think it’s a fabulous photo.
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Diet Transition
Imagine if people had to be as careful about changing their regular diet as the animals in our care. Full disclosure: this line of thought is coming from someone who doesn’t have any food allergies.
For two completely different reasons, we are currently in the process of changing the foods of both our dog and the horses. It is a long period of gradual transition from the old food to the new, serving a portion of each at a sliding percentage.
The horses don’t appear to care much about the introduction of something different thus far. I haven’t seen any indication of change in preference for the mixture we’ve been serving them.
Asher may be happy with his changing mixture because it was starting to look like he didn’t care for the food he’s been served since we adopted him. He’s shown no hesitation with the new brand.
I feel very lucky that the food I can choose to eat isn’t dictated by someone else. Unfortunately, that leaves it up to me to make smart choices. I was thinking the other day that it takes constant mental energy for me to avoid succumbing to my cravings for carbs or sugar foods.
It’s always great when you are granted a free pass to have as much as you want of a healthy food. Why doesn’t spinach taste more like chocolate? I love the feeling when I am thirsty and my body seems like it can’t get enough of a tall glass of ice water. Guilt-free reward.
Oxygen is something else I can consume as much as I want with no limitation. When my mind yearns for something my body doesn’t need, I can think about the total free pass I have to inhale as many huge breaths of air as possible.
Yeah, I’m weird like that.
This time of year there is a lot of tractor time when thoughts can meander. Yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to drive on and mow some of the areas that were saturated two days ago.
It amazes me how fast conditions change. The high ground around here is getting bone-dry. After I finished mowing the backyard, spotty thundering rain clouds rolled past. I put away the tractor and prepared for a downpour.
All we got was a spattering of drops.
I’m guessing all that ground moisture is getting sucked up by plants and trees making leaves. There is now a fresh new batch of phytoncides to absorb while bathing in the atmosphere of our glorious forest.
I’m going to count that as part of my spring diet transition.
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Aurora Watch
We go from Trillium observation on the ground to glowing ionosphere in the sky. Last night, friends Pam Knutson and John Bramble drove out from the Cities to join Cyndie and me in an Aurora Borealis watch party on the hill in our hay field.
We closed gates to temporarily constrain the horses to the paddocks and back pasture. Then Asher and I walked up to the high spot just after sunset to scout our location for sky-watching.
Cyndie packed our zero-gravity recliners and blankets in the car and we set up to await the show.
After reading the multitude of reports getting posted about fantastic sightings in locations well to the south of us, I was prepared for a spectacular event. Cyndie has an app that gives an aurora forecast and it was sending alerts of the increased activity. As Pam and John arrived, the percentage of likelihood was indicating 33% in our location.
We had a great view of constellations and saw satellites move across the sky in addition to regular airplane traffic. As far as Aurora goes, we saw very little with our eyes. However, I had read that using Night Mode on our iPhones would capture more than our eyes perceive.
Bingo!
There was some color showing up through the camera lens around 11:30 p.m. that our eyes could barely see.
This was around the same time Cyndie took another look at the app to see what our chances were up to for a visible spectacle. It had changed from 33 down to 4%. That was good enough to help us all decide to call it a night.
Fatigue helped me easily get over a fear of missing out on even more dramatic viewing after we stopped watching. Our warm and cozy bed was calling my name loud and clear.
At least our iPhones saw something pretty cool.
I had fun watching the night sky with friends for a few hours and listening to the calls of an owl serenading us. I had even more fun climbing into bed and falling instantly into Sleepsville. By that hour, it didn’t matter to me if the viewing outside was becoming better than ever.
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Relative Something 