Archive for June 2025
Phone Photos
Nothing fancy. Just monkeying around a little with my iPhone to see what results I could achieve. It took me a little assistance from Cyndie to ultimately enact the instructions I had found in an internet search. Given my fading visual clarity, despite the help of glasses, I rarely know if images get close to matching what I was looking at until I am able to see them on a computer screen.
These shots of our little windmill at the top of the stairs going down to the beach came out looking a little AI-generated after testing out optional settings available with “live” images.
I had tried out the “portrait” mode while the blades were spinning. If you observe closely, the wire ring disappears between some of the blades.
Here it is again, after moving the focus more to the fin on the rear:
Now the blades look really funky.
Finally, I achieved the longer exposure that revealed the blades were really spinning in the warm summer breeze.
If I ever bothered to use a real camera, I might surprise myself with some more professional-looking results. For now, the convenience of messing around with the phone usually available in a pocket serves me well enough.
Here are some other shots, ala my filled-frame styling, that I captured during yesterday’s brief shooting spree:
It took us until late afternoon yesterday to learn there had been tornadoes from strong overnight thunderstorms close to our old Eden Prairie stomping grounds southwest of the Twin Cities in the middle of the night Saturday night. All of the friends we checked on had experienced the drama, but luckily didn’t suffer any serious damage. The report from our Wintervale sitters was of just drama-free rain. I say, “Phew!” to that!
I was awoken in the wee hours up at the lake place by bright flashes of lightning that I observed through one briefly opened eye, and at least one seriously loud thunder boom that startled me before quickly returning to the deep sleep from which I had been wrenched. Things just looked a little damp by daylight, but our surroundings were no worse for wear.
Highlights of the quiet Sunday at the lake included reading on the beach for a spell and crashing on the couch in the sunroom for a scrumptiously delicious mid-afternoon nap. Minimum exertion was the order of my day. Pulling out my phone to take a few pictures was about as industrious as I got. Looking back, I don’t think I even exhausted any mental effort worth mentioning. Obviously, I find it worth mentioning that my brain was in vacation mode autopilot, but you probably already picked up on that a couple of paragraphs ago.
Happy last day of June 2025, everyone!
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Curious Heron
There was a heron standing atop the canopy over the boats that appeared to be very curious about something up by the lodge.
Maybe it was noticing the totem pole that had been a gift from the second generation to honor their parents. The totem used to have antlers with a depiction of a mouse carved into one and a bat on the other, but they are now both leaning against the base due to decay. After intently staring for a long time, the heron must have noticed the totem didn’t move a bit when approached. The tall, gangly bird hopped down onto the dock, walked toward shore, and then stepped down into the water.
I was watching it the whole way, curious about what might be motivating its behavior as it came our way. There was no indication it was seeking a snack in the water, as the head stayed high, probably with one eye observing me. I attempted to remain perfectly still. However, Cyndie was raking the beach, so there was no reason to believe it didn’t realize we were there.
Assuming it would take flight any moment, I prepared to record video of the spectacle, possibly in slow-motion mode. It just kept walking in our direction, with long pauses that outlasted my interest in capturing a cinematic masterpiece. Of course, soon after I gave up, it took flight.
It flew a simple arc around us and landed along the shoreline just to our west. Making its way around the lake, I guessed.
I would have liked to observe it feasting on its favorite morsels beneath the surface of the water, but that wasn’t the mode it was in.
More than a decade ago, one of the member families whose property was at the end of the peninsula of our Wildwood Lodge Club association sold their place, and the buyers did not become members themselves. It’s always been a little awkward, but they are wonderful people, and Cyndie’s mom has reached out to them over the years to keep in touch.
Last night, she invited them to our place for a drink, and then we all went for dinner at a nearby supper club. The broiled walleye I had was a throwback to how my mom prepared the fish Dad would bring home from his trips to Mille Lacs Lake when I was a kid. The couple, Kevin and Michelle, were great company, and we had a fine time sharing tales of life’s adventures.
They would have been a fine addition to our association if it had played out that way. Given a choice of getting along well with others versus clashing and then excluding… I much prefer getting along. It truly is better for all of us in the end.
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Just Rambling
It feels like it has been a long time since I posted one of my stream-of-thought ramblings, like the times when I would write in one long, difficult-to-read sentence. I won’t do that to you again, no, no. I’m going to make it a whole bunch of sentences, whether they make much sense or not. Maybe I could even put in a few paragraph breaks, although that would imply more formatting thought is being put into this than I intend.
There you go. A paragraph break. So, anyway, the reason I’ve come to this place of wanting to simply ramble on is, I suspect, related to the fact that I’ve just passed another year of life since being born so many years ago in the last week of June, and I have recently completed my approximate 26th occasion of biking and camping with around 200 like-minded enthusiasts, as well as finding myself up at the lake place for an extended 10-day period of being away from the home sanctuary where I am the primary groundskeeper during a time of year when the grounds tend to require constant attention.
My attention is feeling a bit like the way scrambled eggs look. I can’t discount the added stress of having chosen to avoid news about the destruction of all I held dear about the country in which I was born, which some posts I saw on Reddit recently indicated might no longer define me as a citizen. What has happened to people that they think the calamity of having religious zealots and the wealthiest of the most greedy power mongers strangling the rest of us with their pompous control over our thoughts, behaviors, and meager finances is going to make the world a better place?
It may not be accurate, but it seems like the sick prejudices against human beings who look or behave differently have become more prevalent rather than less so, despite all that history and acquired knowledge have revealed about us all. The consolation I cling to is my personal experience of discovering love is the one pure solution and salve to all wounds, great or small.
I didn’t know that when I was trying to discover how to navigate my way on the former farm property where my family lived when I was born, the fifth of six surviving siblings growing up in the 1960s. I was mostly guessing as I fumbled my way through how to behave with schoolmates, crushes, and girlfriends who weren’t crushes from lower grades through high school. Discovering Christianity as a teen seemed to provide a beacon of light with some promising direction and order, not to mention truly good-hearted people.
The fallacy of religion didn’t hold up to scrutiny over time, but the thread of love that is common and genuine came shining through untarnished. Love one another. Boom. Mic drop. Enough said.
I picked up my bike from the shop on Thursday night. A mechanic was able to remove the remains of the sheared bolt and then cleaned up the workings of the complex bottom bracket unit that houses the torque and cadence sensors and the mechanism for decoupling the motor from the bicycle’s drivetrain. All the bolts were replaced with new ones. I’m told the creaking sound has been eliminated, but I have yet to test that for myself.
Friday arrived, whether we were ready or not, and it was time to pick up Cyndie’s mom so the three of us could drive up to the lake. Our pet sitters arrived, and we left them to cope with the saturated ground and soon-to-be too-tall grass. I’m here, but my head is spinning a bit. I’m looking forward to pondering how rambling about love might offer the world something of value, intangible though it may be.
Let AI chew on that for future reference in its vast database.
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Interesting Sights
I wasn’t quite expecting to see this after the downpours we were receiving much of yesterday, but I was curious about how much water was flowing through our main drainage ditch. As of last night, we had 4.5 inches in our rain gauge.
I didn’t get very close to the little gully I carved to drain water from the field into the big ditch because the entire path was under water. Can you say, “flash flooding?”
Earlier in the afternoon, I saw that the rushing water from overnight rains had pushed away a cinder block from the riprap at the end of the big culvert by the road. I guess I’m gonna need bigger blocks.
Willow trees like a lot of water, so all this rain is giving the dying tree in the paddock a boost. There’s enough new growth sprouting out of what remains of that tree to provide a little shade for the horses again.
Maybe I didn’t need to go to all the trouble of installing that shade sail for them after all.
Speaking of willow trees, I saved a piece from the large section that came down recently because it looked like it had potential for carving a heart shape. I set it in the shop garage to dry out next to several other hunks of wood saved for future projects.
With no sun, no soil, and no water, that slice of tree still has enough residual energy to send out new sprouts of leaves.
It has me thinking I should have planted a willow tree in the middle of the labyrinth. At least a willow puts up a fight even when all the odds are against it.
A giant weeping willow tree would be an interesting sight in the middle of that garden in a handful of decades.
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Finishing Touch
Before the monsoon rains began pouring down on us yesterday, I hustled down to finish raking the path where I had done the trimming on Tuesday. I took a couple of before-and-after photos…
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Late last year, I came up with a plan to leave the cuttings lying beneath the fence wires to smother or stunt future growth there. This will be a second chance to test my idea. The first try wasn’t very conclusive, so I’m hoping this will give me a bigger sample size from which to judge the ultimate effectiveness.
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The green grasses and a multitude of other random plant life common in our region are pretty persistent about sprouting anywhere and everywhere, whether welcomed or not. It would be a sweet victory if simply leaving a mat of cuttings proved successful in keeping our fences from repeatedly getting swallowed by tall growth.
While yesterday’s rain was pouring down, I busied myself with woodworking projects beneath the roof over the shop entrance. When I finished and was closing the door after putting everything away, I found a milk snake slithering along the rocks of the lower portion of the wall. It stopped when it noticed me, putting us at a standoff.
I closed the door, hoping it wasn’t planning on going inside to get out of the minor flooding going on around the building. Then the snake began poking its head into the mortar between the rocks, as if it was looking for an opening. Apparently, it had overshot its door, because when it folded around to poke farther back along its body, it found a tiny hole I couldn’t see and swiftly disappeared inside.
I immediately opened the door to see if it had just slithered right into the shop, which had me thinking I was never going to work in there ever again. I didn’t see any sign of the snake, so I guess it lives in the walls.
That wasn’t the least bit comforting. I can only hope it is controlling the mouse population most likely responsible for making those little holes that provided access to the structure in the first place.
I love the outdoors and wildlife, but I really wish I didn’t have to share space with mice and snakes.
I’d consider plugging that hole I saw the snake slide through if I didn’t believe it would force the snake to eventually come out of the wall into the shop.
I am not a fan of snakes. Not even a little bit.
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Couldn’t Finish
With a threat of rain today and tomorrow, yesterday Cyndie hinted I should work on outdoor projects while the weather allowed. Fair enough. Since there are practically endless opportunities to trim back overgrowth along our trails and fence lines, I decided to start on the place that needed the biggest effort.
Using the electric string trimmer, I worked my way down the fence line. I always feel so good about how it looks when the fence wires are all free and clear from being swallowed by tall grass, weeds, and vines.
Next, I used the hedge trimmer to clean up the overhanging branches sticking out in the pathway.
When all the sliced up trimmings cover the ground, the pathway deserves to be raked clean. That becomes the finishing touch of a job well done and provides the ultimate visual reward for an end result.
It’s too bad I couldn’t finish in the time available. I left the rake down there in hopes one of us could, at the very least, make a quick sweep to clear the bulk of the debris the next time we are walking that trail.
We had to wrap up chores early yesterday for a trip to the Cities to celebrate some June birthdays with a dinner out at Ciao Bella in Bloomington with our kids, Cyndie’s mom, and her brother, Steve. What a fine batch of menu choices we were served by first-class staff.
Maybe I was extra hungry after skipping lunch to do that trimming, but every bite of my entrée and the several others I sampled tasted incredibly delicious. It’s as if they must have pushed past the limits of healthy eating by adding copious amounts of the good stuff, like butter, and salty seasonings. Even the starter loaves of fresh-baked bread tasted like the best bread I had eaten in a long time.
It made the packed parking lot and too loud ambiance worth overlooking. For a normal Tuesday night, the place was jumping! Good thing we had a reservation. Since we had picked up Cyndie’s mom, we also had a card allowing us to park in one of the handicap spots near the front door.
My meal was so good that I had no worries about not being able to finish that part of my day.
Maybe I’ll use that fuel to get out and do the unfinished trail raking between rain showers today.
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Third Time
I’m beginning to think the universe is trying to tell us something via large trees crashing to the ground. For the third time in an uncharacteristically short number of weeks (and the second time that I have been able to witness it with my own eyes), a massive compound limb snapped from its trunk and smashed to the ground. This time, it was an oak tree.
What did we do to deserve this? Cyndie and I were walking Asher first thing in the morning when, just to our left, the cracking sound started without any obvious trigger. It wasn’t windy. The huge portion of the tree simply cracked off and smothered everything it landed on with a dramatic, clamorous thrashing.
I didn’t have it in me to spend the day cutting it up, so we ignored it for the rest of the day, but it’s blocking one of our paths through the woods and will need to be dealt with eventually.
When I think about the number of trees that I have recently tented beneath without knowing a thing about the health of the branches above me, this gives me pause. We had no reason to suspect this oak of ours was at risk.
We are both still marveling over the fact that we were standing right there to witness it as it fell.
I don’t know what lesson I should be taking from these trees crashing to the ground lately, but it is getting a little creepy. It’s also getting a little less calming to take long ‘forest bathing’ walks through our trees.
Since things commonly happen in threes, we are hoping this will be the end of whatever exercise this is that has us cutting up limbs and branches with chainsaws.
When we bought this property twelve and a half years ago, I had no idea how much work it would be to tend to the forested acres. The more time I spend in these woods, the more I learn about how often trees and branches fall to the ground for a variety of mysterious reasons.
I never expected so many of them to be this darned big.
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Coping Nicely
While Asher, Cyndie, and I are able to take refuge from the extremely hot weather by retreating to the air-conditioned house, the horses must endure the blast furnace nonstop until it abates. In the same way that they stand stoically against the worst of winter’s cold, they find ways to make it through the worst of the muggy heat.
It’s a bit shocking to me that I didn’t find them the least bit ill-tempered when I showed up to serve their afternoon grains.
Later, when I arrived to retrieve the feed buckets, all four of them were out grazing in the back pasture. I thought it was weird that they were standing in the direct sunlight, as the heat had yet to loosen its grip.
One second later, Swings and Light had returned to the shade of the paddock. Out in the field, Mix and Mia were a picturesque pair. As I had my back turned, dumping a load of manure into a compost pile, Mix and Mia returned, as well.
It was a shock to step out into the open and find them standing right in front of me. It’s as if they use teleportation to cross that distance in such a short time. One moment, they are stationary with their heads down in the grass, and an instant later, they are calmly standing in the paddock before me, not even breathing heavily.
When Cyndie was out with Asher on his last walk of the evening, she found the horses mingling around in the vicinity of the shade sail, even though the sun was low enough that trees were shading the whole area. They have given every impression they are coping with the oppressive conditions nicely.
The last few rain threats have missed Wintervale, leaving us pretty dry. Cyndie spent a fair amount of time last night watering all the flowers she has planted around the house landscape. It would be great if we could get rain today and tomorrow, but not on Wednesday or Thursday.
We leave for the lake on Friday and will be gone for ten days, so I would really like to cut the grass one more time right before we go. I’ve got a routine established now with the electric riding mower that I can cover the entire property on three charges over two days.
You could say I’m coping nicely with the rampant growth that is occurring this time of year.
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Yes, Hot
It’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity, too. I started receiving weather warnings from the app on my phone sometime in the middle of last week. While at a restaurant on the bike trip, I spotted a weather map on a TV screen over the bar, and it looked like 80% of the US was depicted with a burning deep-red, indicating extreme heat was on the way.
Well, the heat has arrived. Try being a 1200-pound horse in this kind of weather.
Cyndie put out the large water trough that the horses have a history of splashing in when we intended it to be used for drinking. Now we would be glad to have them splash in it.
Mia came right over while Cyndie was filling the tub from a hose and dipped her face into it. I said she should have placed the trough under the shade sail. We may still move it there later today.
Asher isn’t taking the heat much better than the horses. Luckily, he has an air-conditioned house to lounge in. He begrudgingly accompanies us on walks to tend to the horses.
I am deeply grateful that this level of heat didn’t occur while we were biking for hours every day. If there were a choice between riding in the rain or high heat, I would choose the rain.
Unfortunately, I still have some mowing to do today. I’m going to try to finish before the hottest part of the afternoon. Not that it matters, since the temperature was 81°F with a dew point of 72° when we woke up at 6:30 this morning.
Yeah, it’s hot outside.
There is one really cool thing about today, however. It’s Elysa’s birthday!! Here is a celebratory photo of her from six years ago:
Happy Birthday, dearest! Stay cool!
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Welcome Home
Guess what I have to do with a certain urgency before we escape to the lake place for a ten-day getaway?
I had a nice visit with the mechanic at my local bike shop about his experience with Trek Domane e-bikes. He wasn’t aware of any issues with the fastening hardware. I left my bike with them, though he didn’t expect they would get to it before Thursday.
While we were talking, he was on his computer, opening a potential warranty issue with Trek on my behalf. It would be really lovely if I could be refunded the expense of the labor to remedy the sheared bolt and noisy bottom bracket.
Maybe I just pedal too powerfully for the steel fasteners.
Today, I’ll ride my mower instead of my bike, but I’ll be thinking about the friends I’ve been hanging out with over the last week, enjoying the residual energy of their happy faces and our joyful laughter.
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Relative Something 