Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Co-Favorite Place
For all of my adult life, Cyndie’s family vacation home on Round Lake near Hayward, Wisconsin has been my favorite place. As I wrote yesterday, my affections are now split between our paradise of Wintervale Ranch in Beldenville and Wildwood Lodge Club up north.
I now have co-favorite places.
It is wonderful to be up at the lake again.
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As always, the special feature of the lodge club is communing with the other families and we received an early dose of camaraderie when the next door Whitlock clan showed up just after Cyndie and I arrived. Much love ensued.
There is a lot to do around the property to make it look less neglected as the ravages of winter appear to have wreaked havoc on anything left out in the elements.
Case in point: The front steps to the Friswold “cabin” for which I was so proud to have repaired a single paver block last summer are now failing en masse as the foundation underneath appears to be giving out.
Entire rows are tipping forward. I suppose it’s unfair to blame one winter for this, but it sure seemed fine last year.
I can’t blame the extreme state of the smoke clouded doors of the living room fireplace on anything but neglect to tend to the task of cleaning them in a timely manner. When Marie asked me to build a fire, I figured it wouldn’t add much to the ambience if we couldn’t see the flames. It took a lot of ash-soaked newspaper to rub off the insanely thick baked-on accumulation of smoke on those glass doors.
At least I had the joy of trying to ignite unseasoned firewood that had been supplied for our fire-building pleasure. No wonder there was so much gunk on the glass of the doors.
Maybe, if I love this place as much as I do home, I need to more equally split my attention to maintenance chores. Is the building of a lake-place woodshed in my future?
I would sure appreciate the luxury of selecting dry wood for our fires. So would the chimney flue.
The more immediate concern will be cleaning the beach today. The lake ice pushed a new berm of sandy leaves about a foot high along the full length of our beach shoreline.
What a wonderful location for putting in a day’s work.
My co-favorite place, in fact.
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Divided Passions
I am torn between two worlds this morning. As thrilled as I am to be able to spend the next four days up at the lake for the Memorial Day weekend, I’m struggling over a great desire to remain home to tend the property, grow our bonds with the horses, and work on transitioning our chicks from the brooder to the coop.
When I got home from work yesterday, we decided to take advantage of the wet weather to transplant another pine tree. This one had sprouted just beyond the deck in a spot where there was little room for future growth. While we were pulling up the roots, Cyndie also extracted a fair-sized maple sapling, so we transplanted that, as well.
They are both visible in the image above, despite also being mostly obscured by a similar colored background. Our spontaneous decision to jump into the unplanned project swallowed up over an hour of time that felt like mere minutes had passed. Completing the transplants fueled a strong urge to get right back outside managing the explosion of growth everywhere on our property.
It will need to wait for another day. We are headed north this morning. Lake place, here we come! It’s been far too long between visits.
I hope the chicks won’t miss us too much.
We looked in on the Rockettes last night before bed and found them looking hale and hearty. Their wing feathers are coming along nicely. They are doing a fair amount of my favorite chick leg-stretch/wing-stretch maneuvers that look so yoga-like. Cyndie added a cover grate to their tub to keep the little test-flyers within the confines of the bin.
We want to move them to the big brooder in the barn as soon as we can move the Buffalo Gals to the coop. I expect that will be a project for when we get home on Monday.
Our current animal-sitter, Anna, a student in her last year at UW River Falls, will be tending to animals while we are gone.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be gung-ho about being away as soon as we hit the road, but I am definitely torn about wanting to be in both places at the same time. Too bad we can’t bring some chicks with us to the lake.
They’re just so cyoooooouute!
Go to the lake, John.
Okay, okay. B’bye!
Oh, and bring back more trillium when you return…
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World Within
I offer my highest recommendation for all who have the opportunity to view PBS programs to seek out Human: The World Within.
Cyndie and I will often default to our local PBS channel when we turn on our television, regardless of whether we know what is going to be on at any given time. The first time we stumbled on an episode of ‘Human,’ I assumed it was a one-time stand-alone program. It was very interesting, but I was simultaneously distracted by other work I was doing on my computer, and I didn’t give it my full attention.
A week later, we came upon the next episode and I found myself unable to turn away.
By last night’s episode 5, Cyndie had set an alarm to remind us when the program was going to be on.
The combination of superb animation showing blood cells flowing or electric signals jumping synapses, plain-speaking expert commentary describing the hows and whys, and the incredibly specific topic of our bodily functions provides the classic result of being both informative and entertaining. I lost count last night of how many times I verbalized exclamations of my wonder over some brilliant aspect of how the intricate details of our bodies function.
Take a deep-dive into the universe that’s inside each and every one of us, by exploring a shared biology that we often don’t take the time to appreciate, or understand. Heart, brain, eyes, blood, tears; “Human” uncovers not only the science behind how our bodies work, but how what’s inside powers every moment of what we do out in the world. Personal profiles of people from around the globe become entry points into deeper stories about how the body’s many systems function.
It feels a little strange to discover how fascinating our bodies are, while I go about most of my daily activities unaware of so much of it.
If you are able, pick an episode and check it out. Then, watch all the other episodes, too. There isn’t a single detail covered that doesn’t apply to every one of us somehow. It’s the human body, after all.
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Trimmer Replaced
Much as I wrestle over making purchasing decisions, this one was easy-peasy. When Cyndie received the call from the hardware store service desk, the list of damaged parts was so long, she couldn’t remember them all. Cylinder, piston, shaft… Can you say, ‘catastrophic failure?’
She asked what the cost of repair estimate was. She asked what a new trimmer costs.
It was cheaper to buy a new one.
They didn’t have any stock of the exact replacement model, which is on backorder with an unknown date of arrival. However, there was exactly one unit in stock of the next model up. The additional cost put things equal to trying to rebuild the old engine.
The decision didn’t get any harder to make.
Cyndie had them put our name on that trimmer and hustled her way to River Falls to pick it up.
In the nick of time. We are already behind in keeping up with the runaway spring growth of grass in the labyrinth, along our trails, and under our fences. Unfortunately, he or she who isn’t the one using it has to suffer the endless droning of the precious small gas engine.
If I time it right, I can be under ear-muffs and mowing on the lawn tractor while Cyndie is trimming.
Of course, the glorious quiet when we finally stop the engines is always a little sweeter when the moment arrives. That adds incentive to trim quickly and make short work of the miles in desperate need of being cut.
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Coop Cleaning
The chicken coop received a thorough going-over yesterday as we took the first steps in preparation for moving the twelve chicks Cyndie has taken to identifying as the Buffalo Gals.
As we pulled out the removable portions, it was discovered that a few repairs were in order. A plank sealing a seam in the hardware cloth lining had come loose in the ceiling. A significant gap between the two overlapping segments provided ample room for small birds or rodents to wander inside.
Not any more. With that problem fixed, Cyndie put her attention to cleaning every surface and I hunted down a branch to make a third roost perch.
As we were preparing to put away tools and call it a day, I remembered the window covers that needed to be installed over the two side windows. I recalled seeing the flimsy plastic forms, covered in dust, stashed in the barn among a lot of other dangerous-looking objects.
Working together, Cyndie and I delicately, and successfully, lifted the covers out of the debris and headed out the back door of the barn to wash them. I was so happy these things had survived the hazards of removal and storage intact.
While I was washing the first cover, Delilah, the oblivious canine, walked up and stepped on it, busting it in three places as I shrieked at her, frantically shoving to get her off so I could pick it up.
That one now has some funky-looking tape on it, but it should still do the job of preventing rain from coming in the window.
At least the coop is clean! For the time being.
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Chicken Thoughts
It was a good question. What are we going to do differently to protect our new chickens this time? When I heard myself answering, I realized how little in-depth thought I have actually given the subject.
Are we doing them justice by raising them amid the same risk of predation that decimated all our flocks before? I’m not sure.
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Cyndie has dubbed them the Buffalo Gals and the Rocketts in reference to their origins.
My primary reason for wanting our chickens to free-range is for the service they provide in controlling bugs. I’ve also discovered how much fun they are as companions and that they convert the things they find to eat into amazing eggs.
I’m not against considering ways we might dissuade such frequent attacks on our flock as we recently experienced. I will put renewed effort into staging my trail cam in locations where I might capture evidence of visiting predators to give better confirmation of what we are dealing with.
It feels a little like our efforts to constrain water runoff and control erosion or prevent excessive sediment where we don’t want it.
Nature does what it does. Our best successes will come from finding constructive adaptations instead of entirely stopping things we don’t desire from happening.
Imagine the predation phenomena from the perspective of the flies and ticks that try to survive on our land. They are under constant assault from chickens.
Our chickens face threats from their natural predators. We’ve decided to not confine them to fenced quarters that would make it harder for the fox or coyotes to kill them.
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Today, we hope to clean up the coop and try making some modifications to accommodate housing more birds than ever before. The Buffalo Gals will be moving to the coop soon. That will allow us to get the Rockets out of the basement bathroom and into the larger brooder tub in the barn.
We will give our chickens the best life possible for their time with us. Past demonstrations have shown their natural instincts help them control their own destiny up to a point. Their life here will not be risk-free.
For the time being, I guess we are demonstrating we are choosing to accept that.
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Strong One
We all have different strengths, don’t we? Yes. Yes, we do. But I am not sure about the comparison of muscle strength between my precious wife and me. This occurred to me yesterday after I got our lawn tractor stuck and needed to go get Cyndie to help.
Despite the more than three inches of rain that had fallen the previous 24-hours to thankfully soak our parched land, I was attempting to mow before things began to adequately dry. I was literally cutting between the trailing scattered showers.
Mow the front yard until rain started falling, park the mower in the garage.
Mow by the barn until it started raining again, park the mower back in the garage.
When I tried traversing the recently re-landscaped dip where Cyndie and I had rolled up the sod to dig out accumulated dirt, the tractor became hopelessly wedged in the muddy turf. I was stuck.
I was also in a hurry because a few drops were starting to fall again. I hiked around behind the barn, past the empty chicken coop, around the back pasture to the labyrinth where Cyndie was rearranging sunken stones and pulling weeds. She happily obliged my request for assistance.
Then, the woman who asks me to use my superior strength to open jars for her in the kitchen proceeds to pick up the back end of the tractor and move it over so my push from the front can roll it around the rocks bordering her perennial garden.
In my whiny sad voice, “Honey, can you come lift the tractor out of the mud for me so I can keep mowing in the rain?”
I know who the strong one is around here.
I’m pretty sure she lets me open jars just to prevent my ego from starving to death.
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Typical Exchange
This is a classic example of a typical exchange between Cyndie and me. To set the stage, it was business as usual around the house last night when I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth while Cyndie stepped into the garage, focused on a task of her own.
Through the white noise of my activity and whatever self-talk was flowing around in my head, I thought I heard a shrill little distant shout. I paused for a second and my creative mind raced through possible scenarios, including the concern Cyndie was shouting in distress about something. The most likely conclusion I came up with was that she had probably sneezed.
As I finished dabbing toothpaste on the bristles of the brush, I heard the door to the garage open.
I said, “Did you sneeze?”
Cyndie replied, “What?”
“Did you sneeze?” I repeated.
When I heard her say, “Yes” I turned on my electric toothbrush.
Over the hum of the motor and with the sound vibrations of the rotating agitator polishing my teeth and resonating through my skull to the bones in my ears, I detected additional distant mumbling that could only have been Cyndie still talking.
I kept brushing. But I thought about the fact that she most likely would assume I heard every word she had said. I wondered to myself whether it warranted stopping my toothbrush to ask for a do-over on that added detail I had missed. Honestly, it probably involved descriptions about her sneeze or what triggered it, both of which I suspected weren’t critical for me to know.
In contemplating all this, I realized this sort of thing happens all the time between us. I tend to hear the first part of an answer, but the colorful addendums tend to get drowned out by whatever else is going on at the time.
If I don’t point out the fact I haven’t clearly heard anything beyond the initial speaking, there arises a falsehood of a common shared reality. Cyndie will assume a point has been communicated and I won’t have any idea that I’ve missed something that might have been significant.
The thing is, nine times out of ten it turns out to be a spur-of-the-moment colloquial expression of silliness or pleasantries. Both welcome enhancements when palling around with a companion, but neither very costly if not fully deciphered. At that, I must admit to being guilty more often than not of letting my ignorance go unnoticed.
A nod and an auditory “Mmm-hmmm” augment the facade of my feigned grasp.
I’m afraid if I were given a test about each day’s conversations, I might score embarrassingly low.
When I told Cyndie this story about not hearing anything beyond the fact she had, indeed, sneezed, she said the added comment was, “…and it was a Lollapalooza!” or something to that effect.
Mmm-hmm. Yes, dear.
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Lucky Thirteen
The final tally from the hatch is thirteen chicks. It’s too early for us to discern the percentage of genders among them, but breeds appear to be spread across all the hens we had, which is very rewarding since the eggs selected were random and of unknown origin.
Just one black chick, which we believe to be from the Domestique. The others with coloring align with Barnevelders and the ones with feathery feet are easily pegged for Light Brahmas. There may be some New Hampshire or Wyandotte, too. In the image above, two chicks were messing around away from the group.
Combined with the twelve chicks Cyndie purchased, we are looking at housing twenty-five chickens in the coop in the weeks ahead. I’m going to need to add one more branch for roosting.
After the prolonged exposure to peeping chicks the last two days, I found my sleep disrupted in the middle of the night Tuesday by the frighteningly similar, though uncharacteristically loud, peeping of a frog or frogs outside our open bedroom window. From the edge of consciousness, I was forced to try to figure out why I was hearing the chicks for some strange reason.
Scary echoes of what it was like to be a new parent and have sleep interrupted by any sound that could mean a threat to a newborn.
I take some consolation in the fact these chicks take more naps than our kids ever did.
At the same time, I find myself wrestling with a concern that we are simply raising coyote food. I prefer not framing them as such, but part of me remains acutely aware that we have done nothing to eliminate that ongoing threat.
Could a poultry protection dog that doesn’t have any taste for eating chicken, nor an urge to play “chase” with them, be a possible option for us? It’s hard to say.
I know by now to never rule anything out.
There was a day when I couldn’t envision how we would ever accomplish having chickens to help control flies when we had no experience and no coop in which to house them.
Now we have twenty-five and a coop I built from scratch. What an amazing adventure it is that we are living.
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Spectacular Hatchapalooza!
I had no idea how this would all play out, but every last moment thus far has been just plain “Wow!” Witnessing eggs hatch is nothing short of hypnotizingly mesmerizing, and I do mean both.
The first beauty surprised us both by emerging just a couple of hours after Cyndie’s early morning audit revealed 9 out of 17 eggs had visible “pips” in the shells. That first chick was getting pretty lonely by 2:30 in the afternoon, which is when I arrived to witness chick number two emerge.
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It takes everything in our power to wrench ourselves away from the amazing nature show that causes time to evaporate but we did it a few times yesterday to eat some dinner, walk Delilah, feed the dog and cat, brush our teeth, and force ourselves to go to bed.
Every time we checked back, there were more chicks.
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One thing I didn’t expect was how synchronously they would behave with each other. Being well-familiar with days-old chicks from previous experience, we are used to seeing how they can instantaneously drop into nap mode. These hatchlings were putting in a Herculean effort of chipping out of the shell, which had them pausing for many naps.
After they are out of the shell, they continue to abruptly crash into instant sleep, and from what we saw, it is highly contagious. It is fascinating to watch. Suddenly all nine of the hatched chicks would lay down as if dead for maybe twenty seconds. When one pops up, all the others take the cue and a sort of cage match chaos resumes, right up until they all fall down again less than a minute later.
Put that on endless repeat, except that it never gets boring. Try falling asleep in your bed when you know there are eggshells being chipped open so that a prehistoric-dragon-looking baby chicken can see our world for the first time in the bathroom downstairs.
We noticed at least one chick with feathers on its feet, ala our Light Brahmas. There are others with hints of dark markings, but mostly, they all seem to have a coloring that reminds us of their dad, Rocky the rooster.
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Relative Something 