Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Full House
Even though the golf weekend hosted by Steve and Ben up at Wildwood is an annual event, seeing so many vehicles parked in the driveway is an unusual sight.
Since I don’t golf, a short time after everybody wakes up in the morning, I find myself all alone for breakfast on the deck in the calm, quiet over the lake. Well, not entirely alone. The two young eagles and their parents nesting over the tennis court made an appearance, visiting the large pine tree between the house and the lake.
In the afternoon yesterday, Paul and David L. joined me for a short bike ride strategically routed to minimize our exposure to the strong wind that blew all day long. Almost 18 miles at an average pace of 14.4 mph. Reasonable exercise in the scenic northern Wisconsin forests.
I saw Paul pointing into the trees ahead of me and turned to look as I passed a large doe that was standing squarely beside the road. She looked like a statue except for a quick shake of her tail as I rolled by.
The highlight of the day has to be the feast we enjoyed for dinner. Jeff brought fresh salmon and halibut caught on a fishing trip the week before. Steve grilled the fish and some brats and burgers under the close supervision of a couple of interested parties, while others tended the corn on the cob and side dishes.
Seating was arranged for 14 on the deck, but half the crew couldn’t wait to dive into the delicacies and chose seats at the dining table closer to the center island in the kitchen, where the spread was laid out.
We lingered on the deck until later than a good night’s sleep dictates, listening to music and regaling each other with tales mildly embellished for effect. Even though a notable conflict on the golf course with strangers earlier in the day that included a fair number of F-bombs didn’t escalate to fisticuffs, the retelling started to expand to imply…
I made a futile attempt to find a spot upwind of cigar smoke, but the camaraderie was worth the unpleasantness. If it had kept the mosquitoes away, I would have found it a tiny bit more tolerable.
You know me, I am well-practiced at finding something to whine about. Don’t be misled. I am having a fabulous time with some great friends. It is an honor to be included.
The early morning thunderstorm has passed, and most of the guys are off already for their final day on the links. I will join any bikers who remain for a roll on the roads after I get up and get going myself. I intend to put the battery/motor module on my bike today to cope with a third day in a row of riding.
My legs feel a little bit like I’m getting to be an old man. Of course, that is why I decided to buy a bike with a motor option.
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Humid Heat
The golf weekend fellows and I find ourselves in an Extreme Heat Watch issued by the National Weather Service. Precautions may be in order.
The heat makes for excellent patio dining. I think their first day of golfing is just an excuse to rendezvous at Angler’s Bar for dinner, as has become the tradition on the first night. We took up three tables, and the server suggested we pay by table. Kevin pulled out his credit card and said he would pay for our table.
When the bill arrived, his eyes got very big. The server thought he indicated he would pay for all three tables. He was being generous, just not that generous.
I went for a little bike ride in the morning, but didn’t start early enough to avoid the heat. I think that took some of my strength. I felt great when I stopped for a brief rest and some snacks after 20 miles. Somewhere around six miles after that, I started noticing a decline in my stamina.
I’d like to say it had something to do with the elevation gain, but I had already started running low on energy before reaching the big climb toward the end. That effort did seal the decision to choose a shortcut home, despite the added time on a busy State Highway with a 55 mph speed limit.
I generally try to avoid the kind of traffic that barrels along on main arteries with high speed limits. The risk was worth it at the end of that ride because it got me out of the headwind and avoided a couple of fair-sized hills I didn’t feel up to climbing. Plus, I made it back safely despite the scare of frequent traffic.
This afternoon’s ride may be a shorter route than yesterday’s since the extreme heat will be at its worst by the time they get done with their morning rounds of golf. I intend to choose a route with a lot less climbing, as well.
At least the lake will be available for a swim to cool down when we get done riding.
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Head Start
I got a head start on my next adventure by driving up to the lake place last night, a day early for the annual Golf Weekend hosted by Cyndie’s brothers, Steve and Ben. Several years ago, they started including me even though I don’t golf. Since several guys like to ride bikes in addition to their golfing, I bring my bike and let them put me through a workout of trying to keep up with them in the woods or on the road.
I’d like to use the excuse that I am getting too old for this, but they are the same age as me, so that doesn’t work.
By coming up a day early, I’m forcing myself to take a break from the groundskeeping work that never ends when 20 acres are growing at a frenetic pace.
Actually, I made great headway cleaning up the pathways and edges of trails through the woods over the last seven days. Some of the growth is beginning to take on a rather hedge-like appearance in several places around the property. That is just what I’m after.
I snuck in a few minutes of bike maintenance the other day, trying my hand at adding sealant to my tubeless tires for the very first time. I made one foolish mistake. Since I was trying to simultaneously entertain Asher, I moved my bike down by the barn, where he loves to sit in the shade of a tree and watch over his kingdom.
At that location, I didn’t have a convenient station for the bike, so I just leaned it against a barn door. I should have flipped it over, but I wasn’t thinking. When I added the sealant to the front tire after deflating it, the weight on the wheel flexed the tire, and a lot of the sealant leaked out of the bead. D’oh!
It was doubly maddening because the front tire was the one losing air faster than it should. I solved that error before doing the rear tire, and the process worked flawlessly. Luckily, the “refresh” of sealant, even though not the full amount, seems to have plugged the leak in the front tire. It’s holding pressure just as well as the rear.
Having never dealt with tubeless tires before, I was feeling a little intimidated by the whole sealant process. Now, after just one experience of adding a new amount, I see that it is not a big deal at all.
I’m going to give my tires a little road test this morning and get a head start on checking out my favorite road routes before the other riders arrive. As a bonus, I won’t be doing any mowing at all for the next few days.
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American Spirit
It would be wonderful if this music video were to go viral. Americans letting their voices be heard via this country’s roots music played as genuinely as can be.
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Many thanks to Gary Larson for sharing this video with me last night!
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Clearing Trails
The list of tasks related to fighting back the natural growth constantly threatening to overgrow our property is getting shorter and shorter. On Sunday morning, I took the chainsaw into the woods to cut up the trees and limbs that had fallen across several of our trails. Yesterday, the tool of choice was the STIHL string trimmer to clean up the paths, some of which we haven’t been walking since they’d gotten too overgrown.
Soon after I’d made it a little way down one of those pathways we hadn’t been on, I discovered another downed tree we hadn’t noticed that would require the chainsaw.
Before
After
The two plants most often cluttering the pathways are Virginia Creeper vines and wild raspberry shoots. Less often, there will be clumps of whispy grasses that tend to resist the spinning trimmer line. Shredding the growth at ground level in the woods with the string trimmer tends to kick up a lot of moist dirt that sticks all over me.
It became a toss-up between the splattering dirt or the mosquitoes as to which was most irritating.
There are two versions of trails through our woods. One is wide enough to accommodate an ATV, which is a valuable thing to be able to do sometimes. The majority of the wide trails were already in existence when we bought the property.
The rest of the trails have intentionally been left narrow to limit them to foot traffic. We have created almost all of these pathways.
This was only the second time this growing season that I have used the trimmer to mow down the trails through the woods. I’m hoping it won’t need to happen again, as growth should begin to slow soon now that we are in the dog days of summer.
There remains some branch pruning to be done to reach my ideal of perfectly well-tended trails, but we are darn close to completing the maintenance of our walkways in the woods.
Forest bathing can soon commence without obstructions.
I suspect I don’t reap the same rewards of walking through the woods when I am wielding a loud and smelly small gas engine and wreaking havoc on a wide variety of growing plant life.
I’ll just have to take follow-up walks on all the trails after I am done, which is easy to make time for since they become somewhat irresistible when they are so thoroughly groomed.
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Ugly Air
I’ve lost track of how many days in a row we’ve been suffering under a “poor” and “low” quality air alert due to wildfire smoke. This morning, it shows up as “Moderate,” but the cumulative impact is lingering to the degree that we aren’t feeling much better. The lethargy I have been experiencing has helped me to avoid doing anything that requires heavy breathing, but we haven’t stayed indoors or worn masks while outside.
The horses and Asher appear to be responding to the nasty air in much the same way as we are. 
They are moving pretty slowly. I watched as Light stepped away from her bucket this morning and turned around toward Swings’ station. She then stood there for a minute or two, as if contemplating whether it was worth the effort to walk over there. When she eventually did, Light slid her nose into the bucket without asking, so Swings lifted her head up out of the way and chewed with her mouth open directly above Light’s head. Light ended up with a little crown of grains on top of her mane, where it covers her slowly healing head wound.
Horses are masters of taking things in stride.
Asher seemed to be looking for better air underground.
One complaint we don’t have during the bout of bad air quality is high humidity. It’s really sad that the dryer air that would otherwise feel so refreshing is being tainted by the smelly smoke particles.
When Asher was taking pauses between digging toward the center of the earth, he plopped down on the cool soil in hopes it would give him a little of that refreshing feeling that we are all longing for.
We are feeling a new level of appreciation for clean air and fresh breezes. If only they would arrive in a more gentle form than the hurricane-wind thunderstorms that seem to be joining wildfires as the new normal on the planet.
I’m afraid my lethargy has me feeling a little more gloomy about the state of things in the world this morning. Luckily, we have a lunch date planned today with friends, Rich and Jill. That will do oodles to bring me to my happy place of love and laughter again.
May you all find a way to spend some time in your happy place today, despite any of the gloom that may be crimping your styles!
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New Bin
What does it say about a person when the most exciting thing in a day is a new composting bin? The plastic compost bin for kitchen food scraps, which we bought when we moved here almost 13 years ago, has succumbed to the ravages of UV radiation and the destructive forces of relentless raccoons.
We picked a different version to replace it, and the company that manufactures it is Canadian and has the word ‘green’ in its name, so no wonder I’m feeling so giddy about it.
Though the confirmation email for our order didn’t show up as expected, Cyndie reached a human support person who apologized and assured her it was out for delivery.
After reviewing the helpful information in the manual and assembling the bin yesterday, Algreen is now on my preferred vendor list. I’m embarrassed over how excited I am to generate more coffee grounds, eggshells, and vegetable scraps to feed the new bin.
While I was in compost mode, I ventured over to the manure compost piles and set about transferring one of the finished piles to our storage location near the labyrinth. That is another two-for-one exercise, as it frees up space in the compost area and replenishes the amount available for immediate use.
One thing I have learned about allowing my piles of compost to rest on the bare ground, surrounding trees are not bashful about reaching up into the piles with their fibrous root structures. When scooping up the compost from the bottom of the mounds, it becomes a battle of tines hooking on thickets of growth that don’t give in easily.
A tree’s gotta eat. I don’t blame them since I’m the one who put all that rich nutrition where they could reach it.
It’s actually a reflection of how slowly we operate around here. The pile by the labyrinth gets dug into very infrequently, giving the trees plenty of time to establish a hearty web of fine root fibers. At the compost area, I’m guilty of leaving old piles that have gone cold undisturbed for longer than is optimum.
If I were to get around to establishing composted horse manure as a cash crop, my processes would get much more attention. Early on in our adventure of transitioning from suburbanites to country folk, we envisioned marketing our special concoction of “soul soil” from the rich compost we were getting.
In reality, I am moving in the other direction now and can often be found throwing scoops of fresh manure over the paddock fences into the pastures instead of collecting the precious material for the compost piles.
Our food compost and manure compost primarily feed Cyndie’s gardens with enough left over to fulfill the requests of a few friends and family who ask for an occasional bag full.
Yet, still, I find myself excited like a kid at Christmas over the process and having a brand new compost bin. It doesn’t define me, but this probably reveals something about my nature, I expect.
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House Fires
There are two times when the topic of house fires gets a lot of attention in most people’s lives. One is during fire prevention events, and the other is when someone’s house burns. It’s not a comfortable topic for conversation. To those who have lost a home to fire, I suspect their lives get divided into “before” and “after” the fire.
In the early morning hours yesterday, one of Cyndie’s brothers woke to a smoke alarm going off, and he and his son were able to get out of the back door unharmed. They stood with neighbors and watched the conflagration for twenty minutes before the firefighters arrived.
One day, everything is fine, and then a day later, lives are in ashes. I’ve pondered this calamity many times in all the homes I have owned. What would I do if a fire were to break out?
Thankfully, I haven’t needed to find out.
This event has triggered a rash of fire memories for me. The most distant being a story my mother told of her mother’s night clothes erupting in flames from a space heater, I believe it was.
When my mom was in the WAVES during WWII and stationed in Miami, FL, there was a fire in her family home in Minneapolis that took the life of her father.
When I was a kid, a family that my parents knew lost everything to a house fire. I remember selecting some of my toy cars to contribute to a care package that my mom and dad were putting together in response. The thought of that family losing everything made a big impression on me.
In the Eden Prairie neighborhood where Cyndie and I raised our kids, there were four house fires on our street over the 25 years we were there. One across the street from ours burned two different times with different owners. The first incident occurred from a candle in an upstairs bedroom, and the second involved an electrical issue in a basement office filled with reams of paper.
Another house got hit by lightning, which caused a smoldering fire in the rafters.
The last fire in that neighborhood happened on a Saturday afternoon. Cyndie spotted the telltale smoke in the air and yelled to call 911 because there was a house on fire. The owner was standing in the driveway, dumbfounded. He told her there were propane tanks in the garage. Somehow, she moved his car out of the driveway. I stayed up on the street corner to wave emergency responders in the right direction.
I vividly remember the loud cracking and popping sound of a ferocious fire gaining energy by the second as I waited anxiously for too many minutes before the sound of the first fire engine siren came into range. It felt like an eternity, and it was excruciating.
Since this topic has arisen because another house has gone up in flames, why not use the occasion to review your home fire preparedness?
Today, we are extremely grateful that Cyndie’s brother and nephew are alright, and we are sending them love and well wishes for a speedy recovery from the devastating loss of their home and the dramatic disruption of their life routines.
Life, after the fire.
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Picking Battles
The backlog of things we would like done on our property is more than we can realistically accomplish on any given day, so we step out the door with vague intentions and see what claims our attention first. The driving factor is either how fast things are growing or what tree or branch has fallen and needs to be cut up and processed.
We also need to react to whatever the weather brings and adjust our agenda accordingly. Yesterday, the wildfire smoke was annoying, and the high dew point temperature made things a sweaty mess, but since there was no rain, we chose to cut and trim mid-summer growth.
Cyndie took the battery-powered string trimmer down to the labyrinth, and I headed for the north loop trail with the hedge trimmer and a rake.
My goal was to create a smooth wall of foliage along the trail marking the northern edge of our property. There is a rusty old barbed wire fence just inside all that growth.
I think it looks better as a hedge wall.
While I was working, I received a call from Cyndie. She needed my help with the trimmer because the line broke off inside the spool. I told her I would be right down.
When I got to the labyrinth, she wasn’t there. I called her back, and she told me she had gone up to the shop.
If there are two different ways to do something, we will always choose the opposite of one another.
As the afternoon wore on, I finished mowing down by the road and around the house. I found Cyndie disassembling our broken kitchen compost bin so we could put the pieces in the trash before it gets picked up this morning. A replacement bin is on order.
I finished trimming along the north loop trail and mowed along the edge of several trails. They will all need to be raked as a result. This time of year, if we don’t deal with the rampant growth along the sides of our trails, tall weeds, and grasses droop over and almost make the pathways impassable.
At one point during the hot afternoon, I caught a glimpse of the horses hanging out under the shade sail. That was one of the highlights of my day.
Today, I get to choose between mowing the labyrinth, trimming under the fence line around the back pasture, using the hedge trimmer on the last length of the north loop trail, using the string trimmer on the trails through the woods, or using the chainsaw to cut up the large limb of the oak tree that is still laying across one of our trails.
If I don’t feel like picking any of those, I could always rake the clippings off the trails where I mowed the edges yesterday. With how fast everything grows, if we don’t tend to some part of it every day, it just gets harder to keep up with the groundskeeping tasks.
It seems like a lot of work –and it is– but it’s a labor of LOVE!
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As Advertised
Warnings were showing up everywhere we looked Monday night, indicating a severe thunderstorm was heading for our location. I had a news station on the television with a meteorologist struggling to find new and different ways to say the same thing over and over about the impending threat, and a livestream of storm chasers on my laptop with constantly refreshing Doppler scan radar images of the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area.
Possible winds as high as 70 mph were coming our way. It was dark outside, so we couldn’t see it when it hit, but we could hear it. At one point, Cyndie and I looked at each other and acknowledged we had just heard something big coming down.
Before we’d even left the house yesterday morning, we could see the crazy number of leaves stuck to the back deck and the front steps. There were an almost equal number of small and medium-sized branches on the ground everywhere we looked.
It didn’t take long to reach the largest chunk of a tree that snapped and crashed to the ground in the woods near our house.
We could hear the sound of a chainsaw coming from a neighboring property. I prepared myself for the possibility of finding a big tree that had come down. Instead, we just encountered a shocking number of fallen branches beneath every tree.
There was a significant number of willow branches both under the tree and scattered across the driveway.
When I got around to mowing, it required a lot of extra cleanup effort around trees.
The debris on the ground from this storm was greater than any prior event we’ve seen in our 13 years here. I consider it a blessing that we did not lose any large trees in their entirety. The rain gauges captured just over an inch of precipitation, so we escaped any ill effects of flash flooding.
Probably the most satisfying fact we can feel happy about is that the shade sail shows no signs of any damage. That was one heck of a test of its ability to remain up during periods of heavy winds.
In the afternoon, we heard another chainsaw being used by a neighbor on the other side of us. It occurred to me that we should have taken a little drive to see the extent of tree damage around our township.
The warnings we received were accurate. The damaging winds that had been advertised arrived and delivered.
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Relative Something 