Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Home Heat
We got home yesterday in the middle of the day, and the heat outdoors was still set to “High.” After a night without power at the lake, the four of us who had stayed one more night –Cyndie, me, and our friends, Barb & Mike– sat in the porch and contemplated our situation.
We had enough leftovers to feed ourselves for breakfast, but then we would create dirty dishes that needed washing at a time when we had no running water. A restaurant breakfast was looking like a favorable alternative.
I reported seeing an Xcel Energy utility truck cruising up and down the Wildwood road in the pre-dawn hour, which was an encouraging sign that they were aware of our problem. Cyndie was able to text her brother, Ben, to learn he had received an email notification that power was expected to be back on by 7:30.
We decided to hang around long enough to see if that would prove to be accurate, placing virtual bets on actual timing. A short time later, 7:23 to be exact, the landscape pond waterfall sprang to life, revealing we were back in business. Sheets went into the washing machine, and breakfast was reheated.
Closing up the house for departure from the lake place was done with much more confidence than if we had needed to do it in the dark, not knowing which light switches may have inadvertently been left in an “on” position.
In the absence of a huge lake to keep us cool at Wintervale, we thankfully enjoy the benefits of geothermal-sourced air conditioning in the house. Asher seemed happy to see us again, but after a short walk outside in the hot sunshine, he quickly sought out one of his preferred cool spots to rest.
As always, the horses appeared very tolerant of the harsh conditions, enduring the uncomfortable humidity with a stoic calmness, despite pesky flies and the absence of a longed-for breeze.
When it came time to feed the horses, we let Asher roam off-leash on the way to the barn. He spotted a squirrel that had been feeding on spilled grain under one of the feed buckets and gave chase.
The critter made one brilliant maneuver that I figured would save it from capture, but Asher stayed after it. They both disappeared into the jewelweed around a tree, and just as I was expecting to see the squirrel leap up the trunk, we heard a squeak instead.
Asher emerged from the underbrush and immediately trotted off to bury his quarry. I guess it’s never too hot for a predator/prey drive to play out. We figure he is just protecting the horses from these pests and putting the rest of the scavengers around here on alert that they are risking their lives if they are going to mess with things around the barn.
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Power Lost
The power went out last night shortly after 10:00 p.m. and has not come back on yet, so this post will be short. I didn’t bring a battery pack to charge my devices, which would be a smart thing to consider in the future. I expect we will be heading home this morning earlier than we had intended.
B’bye for now, beach.
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Heat Beating
We had no trouble beating the heat on Saturday. That big body of water does wonders for avoiding overheating when the weather gets aggressively hot enough to trigger warnings.
We lounged in the water at our beach several different times throughout the day and added a cruise on the pontoon boat for good measure.
A hot Saturday in July brought out a large number of people with the same idea. Both the prominent sandbar at the mouth of one bay and the public island near our shoreline were filled with boaters parking to play in the soothing water.
There is a good chance that today will be a repeat of the same activities since the heat and humidity have yet to ease.
No sense in fighting the elements when there is a big lake offering comfortable respite right outside our door. It’s what being up at the lake place is all about, after all.
Well, that and eating ice cream from West’s Dairy. We managed to do some of that, too.
I won’t mention the hubbub that occurred last night at zero dark thirty, involving some screaming and unwelcome winged rodents that have reappeared inside our living quarters. Maybe I was just dreaming that again.
Cabin life.
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Lake Laughs
Friday at the lake is a time when friends and family arrive for the weekend, interrupting the quiet solitude of being just one couple here with the constant banter of multiple social interactions. It inevitably leads to periods of boisterous laughter.
We soaked in the water as well as in the sunshine on the beach. We went for a walk around Wildwood and visited with families along the way. We paused to gaze at the young eagle perched on a branch over its nest above the tennis court. We stopped by the cabin next door to preview the plan drawings for the new construction that will soon begin where the old lodge once stood.
After new arrivals all settled in, we feasted on leftover barbecued ribs that had been kept frozen since the Fourth of July weekend, along with fresh-picked sweetcorn for dinner. It tasted like summer. Top that off with games of cards, augmented with a dessert of peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream, and you have a spectacular start to a weekend at the lake.
Some game situations were laughable, and several of the stories shared were both poignant and humorous. It’s almost enough to help us forget about the worst things going on in the world around us for a day or two.
Our friends, Barb and Mike, have joined us for a few days. They are thoroughly experienced in all aspects of lake life, so hosting their visit is as comfortable as my 30-year-old moccasin slippers I keep in the closet up here.
The agenda for the rest of the weekend is pretty wide open, but I won’t be surprised if the most strenuous exertion we undertake involves splashing around in the lake before settling in for more games and consuming delicious and nutritious feasts. Several members of the current crowd are in recovery mode for a variety of issues, including a hamstring strain, a foot bone break, and a knee ligament repair surgery.
Luckily, all this laughter makes for great medicine for whatever ails a person.
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Emphatic Change
I don’t know if you will be able to tell the difference, but I am not writing from home this morning. Cyndie and I are in a completely different location on a lake in northern Wisconsin near a town with a Coop’s Pizza restaurant that serves one of our favorite crust/sauce/cheese combinations.
Okay, we are up at the lake place again. That shouldn’t be a surprise. I just felt a little mystery would be more interesting than the same old, same old this time around.
One thing is very different up here this visit, though, but it is not mysterious at all. The lodge has been reduced to a tiny shell of its old self.
We watched the beginning of the demolition as we left for home two weeks ago. I’m told they are waiting on some permits before new construction gets underway to replace the portion that was torn down. One of the first challenges will be leveling the floor of the remaining historic portion, aligning it with the fixed position of the fireplace and chimney.
There is a wild dynamic at play, as the massive change of the shared space vanishes so dramatically, yet it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal at this point. I believe this community of six families has grown accustomed to this kind of change over the years and understands how it will ultimately lead to positive outcomes in the long run.
I have a sense that the significance of these changes would have bothered me more when I was younger than I am experiencing today. Maybe not, though. I received an early lesson in this kind of change when the farmland where I lived as a kid was sold for development, stripped of its trees, and hills leveled so it could become an industrial park.
At this point in my life, I’m finding it surprisingly easier to accept “progress” that seems inevitable.
Change is always happening. Sometimes, just a little more emphatically than others.
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Erratic Storming
What a day of weather we experienced at Wintervale yesterday! Despite all the fence trimming I was hoping to accomplish, the repeated downpours we received prevented me from achieving that goal. The dew point temperature was in the low 70s°F when we woke up, and none of the storms throughout the day did much to change that. The air stayed thick, feeding that energy to the waves of storms that rolled over, one after another.
Before we stepped out the front door to walk Asher and tend to the horses, Cyndie commented with surprise that it looked like it had already rained. I thought that strange, as I walked through the house from our bedroom, because the deck was still dry.
Then Cyndie figured out she had left a sprinkler on all night. Oops. That was probably helping to keep the humidity up.
We were expecting a delivery of a pallet of food for the horses, so we opened the barn and hoped it would come soon. Thankfully, it didn’t arrive so soon that it got caught in the first energetic thunderstorm.
When we received notice that they were a half-hour out, I headed down to the barn to be ready to guide the delivery. I found the horses calmly sharing space under one side of the overhang.
Every time the other three don’t chase Mia out from under the roof line during bad weather is a victory in our eyes. I had to capture the moment with a photo. Of course, the whole other side was wide open for shelter, but for some reason beyond my understanding, the horses seem to have an aversion to taking advantage of such a simple solution.
The rain suddenly paused just long enough that the feed delivery was completed without getting soaked. The driver said that wasn’t the case on his prior stop, after which he followed the storm the whole way to our place, watching the brilliant lightning strikes on the back edge of the squall. While I was standing with the horses waiting for him to arrive, we witnessed one of those fascinating strikes split into two zagging streaks, followed so closely by the bang of thunder that both the horses and I flinched because it felt too close for comfort.
Each time we thought the worst had moved beyond us, and the sky was getting lighter, a blast of thunder announced the arrival of another dose of heavy weather.
Around dinner time, Cyndie checked the rain gauge and announced that 5 inches had been collected during the day. That seemed a bit of a shock to me, so I asked her to find out what was in the gauge down by the labyrinth next time she walked Asher. It struck her as odd that it only held 1-and-a-half inches.
A while later, she figured it out. The first rain gauge by the house was where she had left the sprinkler on all night. Yeah, oops. Sometimes, we humans can be our own worst enemies.
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Declutter Day
It was quick. It was easy. So quick and easy, in fact, that I almost forgot it was part of my day yesterday. There is another likely reason it slipped my mind: it happened at the crack of dawn. A recent acquaintance volunteered to come first thing in the morning to take my collection of accumulated metal scrap. As a thank you to him for doing so, I offered him my old Craftsman riding mower as well.
That became a 2-for-1 decluttering success for me. That mower has been sitting untouched in the shop garage for at least two years. The battery was dead, so I couldn’t start it for him, but we pushed it out of the garage and onto his trailer in a wonderful exclamation point of decluttering.
Taking advantage of finding myself in the decluttering mode, I also finally took action on an inconvenient piece of trash that has been sitting around for years, collecting pigeon shit in the hay shed.
This plastic bucket had a broken bottom but was too big to fit easily in our trash bin. It needed to be busted up into smaller pieces. That’s something that I never found myself wanting to do, so it just got moved around in the shed each time it was in the way of whatever we were doing.
After the scrap metal was easily dispatched, I used that momentum to snap 
that bucket into little pieces that fit into a garbage bag.
There is no valid reason why that couldn’t have happened the very day the bottom of that bucket broke in the first place.
The sun had just barely come up, and I had accomplished a day’s worth of rewarding feats. Then I completed manure management chores and headed to the house for breakfast. I watched the thrilling finish of Stage 16 of the Tour de France on Mont Ventoux, followed by raking, mowing, trimming, and more mowing.
Add in a little jaunt to Minneapolis for dinner with Rich and Gary, where we plotted a September bike adventure in South Dakota, and I found my mind had lost track of how my day had started.
The only thing missing was a nap that I would have enjoyed having somewhere in the middle of the afternoon.
Maybe I can make up for that today…
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Sheltered Lives
Every so often, I notice that I don’t have to fret over the likelihood of masked armed government gangs in unmarked cars showing up to roughly wrestle me to the ground and cuff my hands behind my back to haul me away to some unidentified detention facility.
Having chosen to consciously avoid all forms of news media since the last US Presidential election, my world has shrunk significantly. Morsels of world events come to my attention through friends and family or through my participation in an international online community, as well as occasional discussions in sub-Reddits that the app algorithm steers my way. Other than that, my days are filled with life on our 20-acre sanctuary or the lake place up in Hayward.
In some ways, it feels like I have stepped into a fog. I am aware there are things happening around me. I just can’t see them right now. My life experience has brought me an awareness of the threads of connection between people, as well as animals, in a transcendental realm that cuts through distances and fog.
When we are thinking about each other, we are connecting. Our love and hopes, and empathy reach each other just as easily as radio frequencies that are beamed to distant antennas. When you read tales of my adventures, you become participants along with me.
You feel the drama of an injured horse or a runaway dog, and you are aware when green growth is overtaking the land or weather events are ruling the day.
Upon reflection, we are not as sheltered as a first impression might hint.
Yesterday morning, while Cyndie and I were tending to the horses, we started rehashing the crazy incident of Light’s mysterious head wound. I was pleased at the veterinarian’s impression that there was nothing that looked unsafe for the horses in our facility. One thing they surmised as a remote possibility was that Light could have reared up in line with the metal fascia edge of the overhang.
As Cyndie and I talked about it, I glanced up at the metal edge from a different angle compared to the day of the incident and immediately noticed a distinct bowing in one spot. I can’t definitively say it wasn’t like that before, but it sure could be another piece of evidence about what happened.
I’m happy to report that all four horses seem to be doing well since the doctor visit. No noticeable lingering negative effects from the shots or the dental work, and Light appears to be recovering well from her wound.
Maddy, from This Old Horse, successfully got fly shields on the front legs of all the horses and brought a new fly mask for Mix. She looks good in Superman colors. I’m a little surprised the leg sleeves have stayed on for several days so far. When we’ve tried them in the past, in less than 24 hours, they have found ways to get out of them.
I like to think the horses are soaking up all the good vibes you readers have been sending them over their years with us.
Keep up the good work.
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Ruthless Trimmer
I suspect gardeners with more skill and knowledge would cringe to witness my barbaric technique when wielding the ferocious blades of my hedge trimmer. I don’t so much as prune the ornamental growth and surrounding woods in and around the labyrinth as ruthlessly hack it back from impeding the pathway opening.
It had been too long since I last shaped the variety of plantings that decorate the walk through the labyrinth, and they showed it. I wasn’t going to get away with leaving a few odd trimmings on the ground as mulch because there was just too much of it.
Out came the rake and, eventually, even a pruning saw to remove some real branches before I could get around to pushing the mower along between the rock borders. The thick grass and dampness of humidity made the cut less than ideal as the mulched cuttings became a sticky mess, but the bottom line is, it has been mowed, which it wasn’t at the start of the day.
There still remain plenty of unsightly weeds and some tall grass in the nooks and corners around the rocks that the mower can’t reach. That will require some focused weed pulling or deft application of a string trimmer to bring down, but that will need to wait until I finish clearing the rest of the hay field and back pasture fence lines.
I am just as ruthless with the STIHL trimmer with the small gas engine when it comes to growth around the fences. It’s a great way to burn off any aggression if a person is so inclined. But that’s not me. I may trim ruthlessly, but I do it with love. Tough love, you could say!
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Sunrise Ride
Watching 13 stages of the Tour de France provided ample inspiration for me on a beautiful morning bike ride over the hills and past the cornfields of my neighborhood in the driftless region of Wisconsin.
The low angle of the sun created shadows that proved irresistible for me to pull out my phone while riding, which I am VERY reluctant to do. The odds of my dropping it are extremely high, but I got away with it this time.
I was probably feeling a little cockier than usual because I had chosen to ride in the opposite direction of one of my usual routes, which put me immediately into several big climbs, and I found myself pulling it off without feeling noticeably abused. Maybe all the miles I trod back and forth on our hilly property are keeping my cycling abilities fit.
Since I had failed to test my bike since I picked it up from the shop almost a month ago, I was also energized to find my pedaling was as quiet as ever. It would have been a massive disappointment had it been otherwise.
By riding first thing in the morning, so that I could get back to feed the horses at their usual hour, I still had the whole day open to take on whatever chore I wanted. The one that seemed to offer the greatest return for the effort involved cranking up the diesel New Holland with the brush cutter to knock down the uncut areas along the edges and corners of the hay field that the hay mower couldn’t negotiate.
That is an exercise that takes only a few minutes, but it serves as a precursor to moving into the back pasture to trim the weeds before they go to seed, which takes more than three hours.
After giving my legs an early workout, the extended tractor time may appear to be a more forgiving endeavor, but hour upon hour of pushing the clutch pedal, then the brake pedal, while spinning the steering wheel around and back on every turn, was almost as exhausting as conquering Pierce County hills on my bike.
I had closed the gates to keep the horses out of the back pasture, but they were free to graze in the recently mowed hay field. I always love seeing them out on the grass instead of standing in a stupor under the overhang, which tends to be their preference much of the time. That’s Mia all by herself in the image.
This morning, I’m riding bikes vicariously through the pros racing Stage 14 of the Tour. They are a great inspiration.
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Relative Something 