Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Went Biking
The weather was so fine yesterday, the only thing to tarnish the great outdoors was harassment by flying insects. I put in over 40-miles of pedaling through the gorgeous countryside of northern Wisconsin on my new e-bike and put the new technology to use precisely how I imagined it would benefit me.
I started my ride with the battery-powered assist kept off and rode comfortably for twenty miles, exploring a route of spontaneous decisions to choose my turns. Having a motor provides confidence that if I end up riding farther from home than my legs are strong enough to support, assistance awaits.
The lure of the road to Moose Lake and a gorgeous view of the Chippewa River had me riding a stretch of pavement to the east that was much farther than my vague memory recalled. At least it was mostly flat terrain, so that eased the effort, but that also makes it easier to overextend my total distance.
If I had just cut out the long section to the east, I could easily have finished the loop around our lake without electric assist.
As it was, after 25 miles I was ready for a little help. My average speed changed from 13 to 17 mph for the assisted portion of my ride, which is so interesting because my legs were tired but I was rolling along with the ease of having a strong wind at my back.
The first half of my ride through the great forests of this region was an exercise in whitetail deer dodging. I encountered at least 15 single deer spread out along the roads I’d picked. One was obscured by brush beyond the ditch and didn’t react until I was right beside it. Luckily, it darted away from the road and not right into me, but it still startled me when it reacted.
Another stood in the road from so far away that I wasn’t sure that it was even a deer. I hoped it wasn’t a dog, and then as I got closer and it got bigger, I hoped it wasn’t a bear. Then the definitive outline of the head and ears became clear and I wondered if I was going to ride smack into its side because it held that stance for so long. I was coasting in preparation to brake when it finally started walking away as I got within ten yards of it.
I wished I’d thought to pull my camera out of the pocket of my jersey because that would have been a great picture, but if I’d done that the deer probably wouldn’t have moved until I’d rolled right into it.
The only pictures I took were at a rest stop with this empty field and the newly budding trees on the far border. I quickly put the camera away because the tiny black flies made rolling along with a breeze the better option.
Much of the latter portion of my chosen route was on narrow-shoulder, high-speed traffic county roads that kept both of my hands safely on the controls.
Final opinion: I am very, VERY happy with my new e-bike.
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Early Getaway
This weekend being a three-day federal holiday weekend in the US for Memorial Day, we made an early escape from home life yesterday and drove with Cyndie’s mom up to the lake place.
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We have a recently hired house and animals sitter who is spending her first span of time actually living in our house. Up to now she has been making brief visits to walk Delilah or feed horses in the afternoon while we were away for a few hours. This is the real McCoy now. We are hoping she has a trouble-free few days.
That means we are able to experience some precious time freed of the usual home responsibilities and it feels like it’s been a long time since we had this kind of break. I’m really looking forward to it.
We jumped right in with our favorite, Coop’s pizza for dinner last night. That feels like being at the lake. It being the traditional opening weekend of the summer, there will be plenty of chores to do, but they never feel as much like work when you are doing it with so many friends and enjoying the lake scenery.
Did you notice the geese swimming in the photo above? In the off season, wildlife likes to behave as if the beach belongs to them. It will take a few consecutive days of human activity for us to reclaim our turf and encourage the beach loving animals to choose the less populated miles of shoreline on the lake for their own.
I was able to fit my bike in the back of Marie’s Kia Sorento for the drive up so I’m hoping to sneak in some hours of cycling north country roads while we are out of sight from all the lumberjack work and mowing, trimming, and compost turning that needs to be done at home.
Thanks to our early getaway, we have a spare day before Wildwood Work Day commands our attention. I’m hoping to soak up each precious moment and slow down the perceptions of passing hours so this departure from our usual routine provides maximum benefits.
All this is in contrast to the jarring blemish on our nation’s souls as more blood has been spilled in another senseless mass shooting. Problem analysis from politicians and talking heads without a glimmer of preventive action just serves as salt in our wounded hearts at this point.
There is little reason to believe the formula that feeds this national disgrace will ever change for the better, despite the majority of citizens clamoring for positive action to control access to assault weapons.
I wish we could all make an early getaway from guns and violence.
Hug someone you love and count your blessings for each day you survive without falling victim to some lunatic shooter.
What an embarrassment for the U.S. of A.
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Opposing Forces
What triggered the thought in my head to ask, I do not know. My mild compulsion to seek order and repetition in my daily activities leads me to reset some things while often completely ignoring others. Really, the majority of my efforts for order are preemptive, enacted with the intent of easing future tasks.
One example of this is rinsing pans, dishes, and utensils instantly after use to avoid foods drying to the surface and becoming more difficult to clean later. Another version is clearing snow to a distance beyond the edges of the driveway or walkways to make it easier to clear future accumulations.
However, not all my impulses are entirely practical. This one is probably more aesthetic.
Recently, I noticed that I have repeatedly been adjusting the entryway rug inside our front door to pull it off the sill. I figured normal traffic or possibly an exuberant dog was causing the rug to slide up against the door, so I kept moving it back.
Then, for an unknown reason, I experienced a vivid moment of intuition that led me to ask Cyndie if she moves the front rug up against the door sill.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
Aha! We have been unknowingly operating at cross-purposes, doing battle back and forth with opposing intentions.
She was thinking about catching debris from dirty boots on the rug, so she surmised there should be no space between the rug and sill. I said we could just step onto the rug when we come inside.
Something in me senses the rug should be spaced away to avoid possible interference with opening the door.
Cyndie and I are very different in many ways, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that we were working against each other in this regard, but it is always humorous to discover little details like this when we have been living together for over 40 years.
Our opposing forces may be part of our mutual attraction and balance the many ways we are alike. There is something to the adage that “opposites attract.” It’s rather magnetic, isn’t it?
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Just Starting
We are just starting to find out how much work lies ahead to clean up all the downed trees left by the guys we hired to do all the cutting. After completing the willow, I set my sights on the next biggest mess of trees and branches just beside the labyrinth.
I cut and stacked the biggest chunks to be split for firewood.
I started a stack of branches that will be ideal for turning into chips.
The smallest branches will be hauled to our northern property line where we are making a “fence” by piling up brush.
After making just one trip with the ATV trailer filled to overflowing with branches, I’m thinking we may need to alter our plan. There is going to be a lot more brush to pile than there is space to pile it.
There is still a couple of days worth of clean-up to do in this spot.
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From here, I move on to roughly fifty more trees on the ground throughout our woods waiting to be processed. At least none of those will be as big as the two trees I’ve picked to do first. There’s a method to my madness. I hope it will keep getting easier as I work my way through our woods.
On a follow-up note about Pequenita’s diagnosis… We received confirmation on her hyperthyroidism and will treat her with medication. No other problems were detected in her blood analysis. She has lost five pounds since the last time she’d been in, which was a few years ago. Our wee one is living up to her name.
She is one tiny tortie.
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More Trillium
While exploring our woods away from the trails in search of tree-choking vines, we came upon two beautiful trillium blossoms that were not transplanted here by us. Making the moment even more exciting for us was the fact they each had a hint of purple coloring on the petals.
I don’t know if we will ever succeed in creating a large grove of trillium in our woods by way of our annual transfer of small batches from the lake place, but it doesn’t feel as essential that we do, now that we are finding more occasions where the flowers are sprouting naturally.
Yesterday morning, I claimed a couple of hours for a bike ride that took me down into the Rush River valley, and among the many gorgeous views, I spotted several large groups of trillium growing wild.
That was much more fun to come upon than the two times a dog ran a great distance to threaten me as I pedaled past their territory. The second one was a large German Shepherd that paid little heed to my stern commands to “Stop!” and “No!” Fortunately, it didn’t demonstrate much in the way of endurance and gave up quickly as I continued my pedaling pace beyond the farm.
While I worked on transporting water to our newly transplanted saplings in the afternoon, Cyndie took our cat, Pequenita, to the vet for a diagnosis that might explain her runaway appetite, oddly loud gut sounds, and surprising weight loss lately. She really didn’t have much weight to lose.
The vet suspects hyperthyroidism and ordered a blood chemistry panel for confirmation. We hope to learn the results later today.
At this point, we anticipate there will be medication prescribed for the rest of her life. Oy.
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New Idea
Every spring we discover so many unexpected sprouts of new maple and oak trees in places where they can’t be allowed to remain and every year we talk about transplanting a select few instead of just cutting them all down. Most often, time passes before we get around to taking appropriate action.
Last year we made a rather late-season attempt to transplant a maple and a pine and both failed miserably. With hope springing eternal, I spontaneously pulled up a young oak sapling on Saturday and moved it to the spot where last year’s pine attempt had been located.
Without knowing if that would even succeed, both Cyndie and I were inspired to make more attempts, so yesterday we suddenly set about moving both oaks and maples to the fence line beyond the paddocks where we have long dreamed of adding shade trees.
This is the same place we tried planting many acorns a couple years ago to avoid needing to transplant but not a single one sprouted. Alas, we are back to transplanting, but this time with a new idea for a compensation-in-advance in case none of the relocated trees survive the shock of being moved.
For every tree we attempt to transplant, we have vowed to find a different sapling that happens to have sprouted in an acceptable location and give equal nurturing attention to encourage robust growth right where it started. Without any disruption to the roots, logic dictates we should have a high percentage of success in these cases.
I’m considering them a backup plan to assuage my grief any time one of the transplanted trees don’t survive the shock of being moved.
The effort is minimal and primarily involves cutting away all surrounding competitors to the saplings we select. It’s not that different from what we are doing on a much larger scale to clear out competition beneath the towering mature oak trees in our woods.
With the saplings, we add a step of providing woodchip mulch around them to discourage competing weeds or grasses and also slow the surrounding soil from drying out.
It’s a good exercise for me to learn better acceptance of culling some young trees guilt-free with an eye toward the bigger goal of improving the healthy growth of sprouts that showed up where they are wanted and there will be room to flourish.
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Danger Zone
Green growth is bursting at breakneck speed everywhere we turn this time of year. As much as I dream of letting nature have its way to grow unhindered, experience reveals a number of ways intervention offers room for improvement. Pruning becomes a responsibility, really, to offset the alternative look of neglect.
After enlisting the professional help of tree trimmers to prune and fell trees on our 20 acres, I have an endless amount of clean-up to do in their wake. Historically, I have failed to keep up with the felled lumber that hired help has scattered around our forest floor so I am striving to change that this time.
My effort started with the large willow tree that was first on the list of trees needing attention this spring and which got pruned to a much greater degree than I expected.
Yesterday, I worked to finish cutting up and splitting the last of the large branches scattered beneath the tree after the pruners were finished. The closer I got to completing the effort of clearing the tangle of branches and limbs laying around the trunk of the tree, the more obvious it became that I was working in a danger zone of poison ivy.
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The shiny leaves of three with a tinge of redness in the early period of sprouting were everywhere beneath this willow. Everything that I picked up had a high probability of having been in contact with the dreaded rash-inducing plants but I was knee-deep and hours long into the project so I decided to just keep going.
With extra consciousness to quit reaching my gloved hands up to my face, I forged ahead cutting, splitting, and stacking limbs in the woodshed for drying.
It felt a little insane to be plodding back and forth in growth that was filled with so much poison ivy but I decided it was a risk I needed to face to complete the bigger task at hand. It feels great to have the ground around the tree entirely picked up after the pruning. Now I only have twenty or thirty others left deserving similar treatment.
Thankfully, there aren’t any others surrounded by as much poison ivy as this willow.
At the end of my many outdoor projects, I carefully got out of my clothes and piled them in the basement to be laundered and then hit the shower with special oil-busting soap that I lathered and lathered in hopes of surviving the danger with minimal reaction.
I can hope that I wasn’t breathing aerosolized particles of the oil during the tree branch cutting and clearing efforts. My body doesn’t have a good history of inhaling the irritating essence of poison ivy.
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Good Behavior
I maintain a routine (imagine that) in the morning when I walk Delilah and then feed and clean up after the horses. On my own for the last four weeks, while Cyndie has been convalescing after her knee replacement surgery, the horses are showing recognition for my consistent way of doing things.
As Delilah and I round the bend of the back pasture into view of the horses, I always offer a soft verbal greeting to the horses. No matter where they happen to be standing when I make that turn, by the time I pass through the barn to grab the wheelbarrow and open the door under the overhang, Swings will be standing in the first spot by the door to greet me.
It’s a crapshoot whether the two chestnuts will be on “their side” or anywhere else at that point, often a function of wherever Mix has harassed them to be, but not always. This morning, Mia was right where she should be, opposite Swings. Mix was close enough to where she is served her feed pan. Light stood on the wrong side, about halfway down toward the waterer.
My first order of business is to clean up any manure piles located under the overhang. In the early days of this exercise, the horses demonstrated some impatience with my actions delaying the service of their morning feed. Now they remain wonderfully calm and wait politely for me to work at a leisurely pace to get the job done.
When I disappear back into the barn, they know what will come next. I return with filled feed pans. Today the distribution went flawlessly, which is not always the case. Too often, Light will upset the order by ignoring her feed pan and instead choosing to steal Swings’ pan, which triggers what I call the morning ballet.
Swings will switch to eat Mix’s; Mix will choose either of the chestnuts’ pans, which they theatrically abandon. Mia will be the odd mare out and Light will go find a different pan.
When I am able, I put gates between them, isolating the chestnuts. That calms things significantly. It is only when one or both of the chestnuts stay on the wrong side that I am unable to take advantage of using the gates.
Today, as I placed the pan for Swings and then walked over to place Mix’s, I saw Light stroll downhill around the waterer and come up on the correct side to allow me to close the gates and give her and Mia their pans in the usual locations. All four stayed in place and munched away peacefully.
When Light chooses to play along with my intentions, everyone benefits.
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Heavy Sky
Who doesn’t like posts about the weather? It’s like a friend that everyone knows. We interact with the weather every single day. It’s our common denominator, even though it could be completely different for us at any given moment.
We didn’t receive the hail that our children in the Twin Cities reported, but the wild weather was swirling all around us. Poor Delilah was on full alert trying her darnedest to scare away the intimidating thunder with her most energetic ferocious barks. She leaped straight into the air to get after one particular rumble in the sky.
She puts out an incredibly valiant, yet futile effort to combat the ominous sounds and flashes of thunderstorms. The noise and her frantic energy quickly get tiresome to our weary ears and fractured ambiance.
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While out feeding the horses, the clouds put on a spectacular show that became very difficult to read. I wished I had taken one of the skywarn classes offered by the National Weather Service. The rain came in several waves with just a scattering of lightning and thunder. Between each, we saw moments of sunshine and general calm.
On an evening with a looming threat of severe weather, we lucked out as the worst cells slid either north or south of us. As nightfall descended, we walked out to deliver the trash and recycle bins to the road and got a good view of the backside of one of the big cells.
Our sky was beginning to look much less heavy already.
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Dandelions Anyone?
It is peak dandelion season and we appear to have a bumper crop. It is also itchy rash season again from nettles and poison ivy. Every day the look of our landscape changes as plants and trees sprout leaves. Some of our varieties of grasses double in size every day. I have been using the power trimmer to clean up the edges of the hay shed and barn as well as areas of grass that were too wet to mow with the lawn tractor.
I am thrilled with how the transplanted maple tree is thriving at the center of the labyrinth.
With some precision trimming last year I have successfully encouraged a favored branch to become the leader and it is growing perfectly.
One day later, the dandelions appeared to be swallowing the labyrinth with their multiplying number beginning to cover some of the rocks defining the pathway. Yesterday afternoon I slowly walked the entire labyrinth with the power trimmer to restore order.
I think we are going to need bigger rocks.
The diameter of the labyrinth is so large there are several different micro-climates. The back half that is shaded in the afternoon is dramatically different from the front that receives sun all day long. Actually, the main change is in how much grass there is. The weeds are pretty consistent throughout.
There is a sumac tree that appears to really want company because new sprouts were turning up very frequently for about 5 rows of the back quadrant near the mother tree.
Maybe the sumac tree can make friends with all the dandelions instead.
There are more than enough available.
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Relative Something 