Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Minor Procedure
Yesterday afternoon, Cyndie underwent a minor surgical procedure on one of her fingers and I was given responsibility for dinner. Our usual routine when it is my turn to cook involves a phone call to Cyndie’s favorite pizza place, Gina Maria’s. When they opened a location near my workplace in Plymouth and offered to deliver half-baked pizzas to our suite for me to take home, I became a regular customer.
Often, when I would call in my order, they ask if I wanted the same thing as last time. Sometimes I did. They make a fantastic deep-dish crust that we find almost irresistible. At the same time, we both love variety, so we occasionally mix it up and go for classic thin.
For last night’s dinner, I ordered a large because it might be the last time I have them deliver to me at work. I warned them that I would be disappearing from their list of regular customers.
This is what they delivered:
The person taking my order reminded me I could always come pick it up myself or have them deliver to our home instead.
“We live in Wisconsin.”
I think that is when they decided to decorate our box.
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Night Walks
Just because the daylight hours are short doesn’t mean Delilah doesn’t still get that obligatory one last out-and-about before bed each evening. This time of year those “potty walks” have an added sense of adventure due to the distinct tunnel vision view we experience as we meander along the trails.
Who knows what could be lurking just out of view in the dark?
At least with the snow, we can see clear evidence if there has been recent traffic either crossing or traveling along our same path. I should probably never doubt that Delilah’s nose wouldn’t sense if another animal was nearby but we’ve seen so many times when she appears to ignore some creatures we encounter in our daytime travels that I’m left to wonder.
One time I turned my spotlight 90° to our left in the woods and illuminated four or five sets of reflecting eyes staring back at me for a brief moment before the herd of deer bolted in exit, stage right. Delilah didn’t even flinch.
All the night-vision animals offer up such noticeable eye reflections that it is those two bright dots that I find myself watching for more than anything else. That’s a tendency I have honed over many miles of commuting our country roads in darkness.
I’ve encountered many more staring animal eyes while driving my car than we’ve ever come upon during our night walks. I figure they have a lot more time to figure out I’m coming toward them when it’s me and Delilah plodding along on foot through the darkness and they don’t choose to hang around for a closer look.
Honestly, that’s okay with me. Even though it’s a thrill to occasionally find an owl perched in our woods, I don’t mind doing our treks without uninvited company providing momentary startles right before bedtime.
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Flavorful Fun
Last night was supposed to be a dinner and concert outing in Minneapolis with our friends, Barb and Mike Wilkus. It turned out to only be a dinner date. We arrived at the location of the main event and found the place dark and the doors locked. Cyndie double-checked her email inbox and found a message informing her the concert was postponed. Oops.
Luckily, dinner was fun enough to make our outing already worth the drive through snow-congested traffic. We made our first visit to The Market at Malcolm Yards, an urban food hall in the historic Harris Machinery Co. building not far from the University of Minnesota. Wilkus Architects worked for several years as a partner in designing The Market at Malcolm Yards.
The food selections were varied enough to make decisions difficult because it all sounded alluring. Cyndie and I love to share so we each ordered something different and combined them for a feast of Korean Style Chicken with two sauces and kimchi slaw, grilled marinated cauliflower (yummy!), empanadas –one BBQ chicken and one chorizo– with two sauces, and good ol’ french fried potato strips to offset the bite of so many spicy flavors.
There were also some ice cream bites included that calmed our palates before we wrapped up our dining experience and drove off to find the concert that wasn’t to be.
The concert event was a fundraiser for “This Old Horse” and while the four of us lingered in the Wilkus’ car in the parking lot of the venue, we had a chance to meet one couple who are caring for rescued mustangs in Goodhue. Like us, they hadn’t learned of the postponement either. They were the second unaware couple with whom we were able to share our discovery before departing.
The lingering flavor memories of our fun dining experience more than compensated for our aborted concert date.
I’m already plotting what else I want to order next time we make it to The Market to eat.
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Remembering Winter
It has been a couple of years since we’ve had horses over the months of freezing temperatures and blowing snow. I’m finding it a little comical that neither Cyndie nor I remember how we handled the nuances of our barn chores during the winter months.
It’s not difficult to make it up as we go along, except for the nagging knowledge that we already had a smoothly functioning routine once before. Seems like we shouldn’t have to start anew.
Yesterday, we found the waterer was freezing up, leading me to believe one or more of the heating elements are failing. At least that is a new problem because we never needed to worry about that before.
Manure management is a little wobbly. Sometimes, frozen poop is easier to scoop up. A lot of other times it isn’t. I keep telling Cyndie we used to leave it all in place until spring but she doesn’t remember it that way. The difference, I believe, is that we haven’t received much snow yet and we can still roll the wheelbarrow around. She’ll be happy to leave it all when/if real snow begins to accumulate.
I’ve reminded Cyndie that we plowed a path from the barn to the compost area and only scooped under the overhang and in the stalls over winter. Since we don’t have any snow yet, the obvious limitations aren’t there.
I’m already trying to recall my routine of resuming active composting after winter releases its grip. Those of you who keep dogs in your backyard in places where snow covers the ground for months know what the ground looks like when the snow first melts. Multiply that mental image by the volume four horses produce.
We are getting hit with seriously cold temperatures and aggressive winter winds already. The unknown element of snow accumulation remains to be revealed in the weeks ahead.
I’m waiting to find out if this will turn out to be a winter like the snowy ones I remember most from the recent past.
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Not COVID
After almost two years of the pandemic, I finally had a reason to get tested for COVID-19. The Delta variant is raging and the Omicron variant is beginning to spread but so far I have survived in general isolation, mostly buffered from first-person contact with known positive cases.
On the Sunday after we hosted Thanksgiving, I sensed a tickle in my throat. It seemed like a wimpy cold until the fourth day when it intensified significantly. Worried that I may have misjudged what I was experiencing and sensitive to the fact we are in the midst of a pandemic, I called my doctor and was told to come in to get tested for COVID.
I had received my vaccine booster shot on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but no masks were worn when sixteen of us spent the holiday together at our home, some of whom had traveled from other states.
When my son called with news that he was experiencing the same symptoms as me it raised my alarm a little, but he had good news of already receiving a negative test result for COVID. It restored my confidence that I would likely receive the same result.
Yesterday afternoon I began to feel my cold symptoms had plateaued and this morning my temperature has returned to normal. An hour ago I received the call confirming my test for COVID was negative.
So, my avoidance of the pandemic virus continues but my run of good luck for freedom from illness has ended. It was a little strange to experience “normal” cold symptoms during this time when a more lethal contagious virus is filling hospitals to the brim but in the grand scheme of things, it was just a normal cold.
Normal isn’t normal, usual, typical, or what is expected anymore.
Uncertainty is probably the better descriptor.
Be vaccinated out there!
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Short Shift
I had a very short shift of animal care last night while Cyndie was at her mother’s house for the night. Delilah seemed thrilled that we could walk through our woods again, now that the deer hunting season is over. The temperature was in the 50s(F) which seems really strange for any day in December, but not all that surprising now that the global climate is being cooked.
The warmth seems to have kicked our burrowing rodents into high gear. By the size of some of the fresh dirt piles showing up they must be building extravagant palaces beneath the turf. The soil they bring up looks so pristine. I really should collect it for future use. Not a stone to be found among the mounds of wonderfully sifted dirt.
Our habit is usually to just stomp the piles flat again but there was just too much dirt for that yesterday. I couldn’t pound them down enough so I decided to kick them around, instead. A little like kickin’ horse manure in the pastures.
I found the horses to be incredibly serene when we showed up to serve the feed pans with afternoon rations. It probably rubbed off on Delilah because she barely made a fuss while waiting for me to finish, barking only briefly at nothing in particular.
In less than an hour, all the animals were taken care of and I had the night free to lose myself in the first episode of the 3-part documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson.
Lose myself, I did.
I am eternally grateful to the fab four for allowing themselves to be filmed at the time and indebted to the camera operators and sound technicians who successfully captured so many hours of unscripted randomness. That we can all watch this unique footage some fifty-plus years later is remarkable to me.
With two more episodes to go, this documentary is the opposite of a short shift, and I will savor every drawn-out moment.
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Unexpected Fireworks
As Cyndie was about to serve the horses their dinner last night around the time the sun was setting, the tranquility was disrupted by the sound of fireworks exploding.
I was listening to music at the time and spotted a text from Cyndie urging me to step outside to hear “crazy sounds.” I had been aware of something going on outside but discounted it as likely the sound of a neighboring farmer harvesting crops or some other activity.
Opening the door brought the instant clarity of the sound of fireworks. Not typical fireworks that pop in a planned sequence but non-stop, chaotic pops and bursts that told me this was an out-of-control event. It wasn’t dark enough yet for fireworks, anyway. Through the tree branches that obscured my view from the deck, I could tell a large smoke plume was rising into the sky.
I stepped back inside to grab binoculars that allowed me to spot bursts of color happening at the bottom of the billowing smoke. Those were fireworks all right. The peak of the bursts was just barely visible above the horizon.
I have no idea what distance away from us that would place the fire but I double-checked the overhead view on the map to verify I was looking toward the little hamlet of Beldenville. I just don’t know at this point if it was that close or some greater distance beyond. There has been no obvious evidence that I’ve noticed that would explain why a large number of fireworks are stored in the vicinity.
We checked the neighborhood app and looked at multiple news sources but couldn’t find any immediate explanation being posted. The popping sound of small shots lingered for over four hours lending credence to the belief the conflagration was newsworthy.
In this age of instant information available on the internet, I discovered my lack of participation in the multitude of social media applications leaves me out of the loop when something like this occurs. Maybe someone was streaming live video and I just didn’t know how to find it.
If anyone discovers what happened around here last night, point me to where you found the story.
Maybe I’ll finally get around to finding a scanner that monitors local emergency response calls. We don’t hear sirens in the area very often, so when we do it usually leaves us wondering what has happened.
Seeing the smoke plume and hearing the exploding fireworks made it pretty obvious what was happening, we just don’t know how close it was happening.
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Future Me
I recently saw a news article on the topic of “health span” as compared to life span. If people live longer but haven’t taken care of their health, the golden years can be fraught with ailments instead of desired retiree pursuits. It gave me a new appreciation for how many of my present moment decisions are made with “future me” in mind.
Planting trees is a primary exercise in doing something for “future me.” Sometimes, it’s even more for generations that will be around after I’m gone. I like to point out the giant maple trees near our labyrinth with an invitation to imagine what it will look like in a hundred years when the fingerling we transplanted from beneath them has matured in the center of the labyrinth.
We could all do better by making more decisions each day with our future selves in mind.
Even when it comes to the water we drink toward healthy hydration each day, what we are doing in the moment actually pays dividends tomorrow. There is a time element to how our cells absorb, so to be at our peak tomorrow, we need to drink enough water today.
The planking and stretching exercises I do in the morning are a routine I adopted to strengthen my core for next year and beyond. A little workout at a time for a future me in ten years.
Scrubbing my mental health to purge negative thought patterns and replacing them with positive messages as a daily practice is absolutely a gift to future me. I have witnessed more than enough people who seemed to grow gloomier with each year that passes to inspire my goal of achieving the opposite.
With these life practices, I’m hoping “future me” will be happier and healthier than present-day me. I would be very satisfied if my health span and life span came out as close to even as possible.
Wouldn’t everyone?
I recommend allowing our future selves to guide all our daily decisions instead of just relying on the possibility of luck to bring us happy endings.
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More Sky
We seem to have fallen into a pattern where the sky is our focus for photography of late. Cyndie shared this wonderful sunset view yesterday:
As I enter the final month of commuting to the day-job, this brings to mind the sunset of my career in electronics manufacturing, which next leads to the sunrise of my expanding days on the ranch. This is where I thought I would be shortly after we moved so far away from my place of employment nine years ago.
Back then, I thought I might find work closer to home so I wouldn’t have to drive to the far side of the cities for work. I never planned to keep going back to the old job all these years.
We didn’t really plan on living in the midst of a global pandemic, either, but now that’s what we’ve got.
Leaves me a little timid about guessing what the next few years will bring. For now, caring for our rescued horses and coming up with a different way to keep chickens are two highly likely areas of focus.
And beyond that, a lot of soaking up our glorious views of the always fascinating sky.
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Interesting Cloud
In many ways, the weather around here the last few days has felt rather November-typical and the sky has been a constantly changing mix of cloud types with intermittent moments of blue.
Yesterday, we saw what almost looked like the monster of all contrails.
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Feel free to make up your own scary conspiracy story to explain what “they” are up to that created this spectacle.
It appeared close to the time the Omicron variant showed up in the world… Coincidence?
Um, in case you don’t know me that well yet, I’m poking fun at those who might actually believe the line above.
Regardless, doesn’t hurt (except maybe some people’s pride) to put on a mask if you are near a lot of other people.
Never mind to those of you who stormed the college football fields in Ann Arbor or Minneapolis yesterday. Hopefully, your euphoria will protect you from infections.
Big wins are soooo much fun in sports competitions. Way to go, Gophers!
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