Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
First Shoes
Baby gots new shoes! Sadly, it’s not all fun that led to this milestone for Cayenne. She has shown virtually no improvement in the last week with her painful inflammation of the tissue that connects the hoof wall to bones in her hoof. Cyndie has put in extra time with the horses to get them indoors overnight, where the footing is soft and the horses can spend extra time safely off their feet.
Cayenne has also been receiving regular doses of anti-inflammatory medicine. Still, she continues to show signs of being so uncomfortable that she will resist walking down to the waterer to get a drink. Cyndie put out an additional bucket of water to accommodate Cayenne’s trepidation over crossing the crunchy distance to the usual waterer.
When the vet visited to confirm Cayenne’s laminitis diagnosis, he listed options related to the pending farrier appointment for our horses regular trim. He assured us that George would know what to do.
We started with a modified trim to help distribute the weight away from the most tender pressure point of Cayenne’s hooves. Since improvement was not apparent, we moved to the next level. Cayenne would get shoes.
Not just shoes, but also a leather pad that George enhances with the addition of a special void-filling concoction to maximize the protection of her sensitive tissues.
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George gave us extra attention at the end of his work day to squeeze in time giving Cayenne her first-ever experience of nails pounding into her hooves. She responded as well as we imagined possible and though obviously uncomfortable, stood long and calm while George fit the shoes and hammered them home.
Cyndie held the lead with a handful of hay as a ready distraction and Cayenne accepted the pounding on her feet as though she understood it was for a greater good.
The shoes are only on her front two feet, as those are the primary weight-bearing two and are giving her the most trouble.
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George finished the job with an application of hoof sealer that gave her a shiny look of high fashion. I’m sure she will be the talk of the herd with her new fancy feet. Now we continue the anti-inflammatory meds and watch for improvement.
Hopefully, her pain will ease and we’ll have our healthy old Cayenne back to full activity in the shortest time possible.
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Fading Fast
It’s March alright. Snow melts in the rising spring sun as fast as it falls from the late-winter clouds. It kind of resembles my motivation some days.
Three days this week started with a covering of fresh, white snow. The first morning was so fresh, it was still falling out of the sky. The drive to work was a maze of crunched cars that had spun out and crashed into each other and flashing blue emergency lights. Those of us successfully navigating the slippery mess were forced to move from one side of the freeway to the other, alternating back and forth to get around the frequent closed lanes.
Over the last two days, the snow has been mostly melted by the time I got home in the afternoon. It must be time for high school hockey and basketball tournaments. In my lifetime the March tournaments became synonymous with classic winter storms that delivered oodles of snow accumulation.
I have a feeling that association is fading along with the rest of what we used to know as winter around these parts.
Meanwhile, Cayenne is causing us increasing concern with her laminitis induced lameness. She hasn’t improved enough for us to feel the anti-inflammatory doses and overnights in the barn are making a difference. George is here this weekend and we are talking about putting some shoes and pads on her feet.
We don’t know if it will freak her out to have shoes on, but it is worth the attempt since George tells us there is no harm in trying. It will at least feel like we’re not giving up on her. Otherwise, we just fret over her lack of improvement.
At the same time, we are also a little more concerned about Delilah, having now done some reading on “hot spots” after learning about the condition from Steve and Liz’s comments. Seems like a reasonably likely diagnosis to us, but the range of possible causes have us a little stumped.
Fleas? Allergies? We hope not.
I think she’s probably frustrated over not getting a full season of cold and snow.
Cyndie captured this portrait with a snow-frosted snout yesterday morning. Delilah does show a good fondness for the white stuff.
It’s a little curious that we just had her groomed last week and are now seeing an issue that can be a result of lack of grooming. There is also a possibility she is allergic to a shampoo the groomer used, but the reaction seems rather delayed for that to have been a trigger.
So, one horse and one dog are a little out of sorts for us. With winter fading fast, it would be nice to have the animals returning to peak health before the next challenges arrive.
I seem to recall a plan of adding chickens around here this spring to aid in controlling the tick and fly populations. More creatures to be concerned about.
I tell ya, this caring for animals life is not for sissies!
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Delilah’s Dilemma
Delilah must have rolled into some sap. Cyndie thinks it might have been bugging Delilah for a few days. Our poor dog was biting at it, pulling her hair out, and licking obsessively, which eventually created a sore spot of raw skin.
When I got home from the day-job, Cyndie was working her way through an escalating series of interventions to dissuade Delilah from messing with the sore. She had yet to find a method that achieved her goal.
Poor Delilah didn’t realize her lack of cooperation was the cause for the increasingly intrusive control methods being hoisted upon her.
Finally, out came the pad and cling wrap. Cyndie started applying it while Delilah was lying down on her side, and I was getting ready for the chaos that was about to happen when Cyndie tried getting the cling around Delilah’s body. Then she told Delilah to stand up, and the dog responded perfectly, allowing Cyndie to complete the wrap.
It wasn’t very tight, so after a couple of hours it had slid down off the sore spot, but it did help Delilah stop fixating on the wound for a little while.
Before the end of the night, Cyndie had reached the point where she was willing to try the “cone of shame” around Delilah’s head. It wasn’t a full effort, stopping short of threading her collar through loops on the cone as directed, so it didn’t last long. It didn’t really matter. Delilah’s obvious misery was so extreme, to the point of not wanting to move a step while tucking her tail and ignoring any offering of treats, it led to the swift removal of the psychological torture.
It was such a sorry sight, I didn’t have the heart to violate her indignity with a photo recording the moment.
We prefer to remember her in her better days, like the time this weekend when Cyndie grabbed a pillow off the couch and set it on the floor in front of the fireplace to lay on. In a flash of milliseconds after the pillow landed, Delilah dove in for a pin-point landing before Cyndie could lean back.
The dog had arrived with her fangs wrapped around a precious morsel of bone and went about her business with a feigned obliviousness to the intrusion she had brilliantly executed. When Cyndie turned to question the violation of space, she got the well-known universal dog expression. The look that says, “What’d I do?”
Puppy eyes. Twist of the head.
“Whaa~aaat?”
She knew exactly what she’d done. I don’t buy that act for a minute.
Yesterday, shortly after my photos of disappearing snow posted, we got a fresh new (temporary) inch of white stuff covering everything. Cyndie cleaned off the upper parking pad of the driveway.
Delilah was granted some leash-free time to watch. I think the snow probably felt good on her sore spot. She makes for such a noble looking sentry, doesn’t she?
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Snow Goes
The month of March arrives with its saying about lambs and lions, but the climate confusion we have going may require we come up with a new definition for the chaos of winter’s departure. Last week’s snow is fading fast around here now.
The little snowman that Sara made on Saturday has become just a fraction of his old self in the back yard.
In a week and a half we’ll be moving clocks again to shift the days an hour forward. Will it inspire me to get anything more accomplished in the evenings after work? I don’t know.
There is plenty to be done, but my motivation has been lacking by the time I get home from the commute. Of course, yesterday it happened to be a gloomy gray day.
If the sun is out and the air gets warm, I expect there will be an added spring in my step.
With the grounds wet and soft, I can turn my attention to some machine maintenance that is more than due, and there is always wood to be split.
Indoors, we have an appointment tonight for a quote on window replacements, and then I have a dishwasher door that needs the counter-balance spring mechanisms replaced.
I don’t see a day on the calendar marked for lollygagging around anywhere in the near future.
Do I need to make an appointment for that?
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Forgotten Albums
I went on a download binge of old music from my youth over the weekend. When I finished high school, I spent a year working full-time in a record store. Spending long hours exposed to a repetition of newly released music tends to in grain the songs in a person’s mind.
Every once in a while I get an urge to hear the old tunes again, but the majority of my old album collection was sold long ago. If I want the music back, I need to buy it again. I’m okay settling for digital versions that can be conveniently downloaded, but those offerings aren’t as complete as I need them to be.
My tastes, and the depth of music I was exposed to back then, move beyond the mainstream of what has been converted to digital.
I don’t know what the parameters are that record companies use to dictate what gets digitized and what doesn’t, but it always surprises me when I stumble upon something that has been passed over for upgrade to the latest technology.
Luckily, I still have my old turntable, so if I get truly desperate, I can always shop for the vinyl versions of old favorites that I once thought I would never miss again.
Before I do that, I first need to find the single milk-crate-sized wooden box of the most precious saved albums I couldn’t part with, stored downstairs somewhere, to verify my latest craving isn’t actually one I kept.
My digital music collection has taken on a renewed importance again, as the public radio stations are running one of their thrice yearly fund drives this week. We are already sustaining members, so I avoid the whole pitch and replace radio in the car with my iPod on shuffle.
I keep coming up with songs I had no idea were in my collection. It’s a wonderful distraction during my long commute to the day-job.
After purchasing some old favorites, like the Blues Brothers album that came out while I was working the record store, I needed to update my iPod. I didn’t want to completely sync it with my home iTunes library because the iPod has some music on it from CDs I ripped on my work computer (because it is an old iMac that still has a disk drive in it).
Not thinking clearly, I stumbled on the feature where I could select just the new songs I wanted to add. Thinking I had found my answer, I clicked the 5 new —using that term relatively— albums to copy over and hit sync.
Do you see what I did there?
When it was finished, I had all 5 freshly downloaded albums moved to the iPod… but that was all I had. Be careful what you sync.
I gave in and let my entire home iTunes library re-sync with the iPod. Now I need to go back later and figure out what method I originally used to move only the 4 albums ripped into the work iTunes library, onto my iPod.
I’ve done it before, I should be able to do it again.
I suppose this would be a lot simpler if I’d just store all of my music in the cloud.
Maybe I’m just waiting until they digitize all the music I really want before I will finally take that step. The ball’s in their court.
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Quick Return
It feels like spring! Seriously. A day after the snowstorm, our uncharacteristic weather has made a quick return. The clouds are gone, the sky deep blue, the sun shining bright, the air warm, and the snow, totally sticky and melting. It is something that can’t be controlled, so we just take what is delivered.
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The back yard is filled with evidence of visitors sledding and building snow sculptures. The snow is sliding off the metal roof of the shop.
I may look into a metal roof for the house when our shingles reach the end of their life. I would prefer to have the snow slide off the roof without my needing to pull it down using a rake on a very long pole handle.
I got a little tired toward the end of my efforts of pulling down snow from the roof on Saturday. On the last section, I hung the rake on the lip of the eave, just like I had done all the way around the rest of the house. But I let go of the handle with a careless lack of attention to detail.
It swung away from me with a little too much momentum. As I watched a fraction of a second last much longer than that in my mind, but quicker than my body could react to, the rake lost contact with the roof.
Why couldn’t it just fall harmlessly to the ground beside the house?
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Harvesting Popsicles
It’s still February on the calendar, but our warm days have started the sap flowing in the trees already. As a result, the leaking wounds on our recently pruned maple trees are forming sap-sicles with a sublime sweetness and hint of maple flavor.
The daytime temperature yesterday reached the melting point and the mostly sunny sky created the magical act of disappearing snow. I pulled the drifted snow off the roof over the front door and along the valleys beneath the main peak and the shingles started steaming instantly as they absorbed the solar energy and warmed up.
I had started the day with a walk down the driveway to assess the condition and found it to be a frozen mess. The snow that fell during the second half of the storm, after I had plowed once, was melting into a slush that had re-frozen overnight into an un-plowable mass.
That shifted my morning focus to shoveling. By the time I got to plowing in the afternoon, much of the driveway was exposed pavement. I cleaned up the edges, battling to keep the blade from slicing into the soft turf, and then worked on the gravel section around the barn.
That was a trick. The snow was sticky and the gravel soft. The task gets a bit less forgiving, requiring more attention to detail than I really wanted to give it. It becomes a mental wrestle to convince myself the chore even needs to be done, and if so, how thorough to follow through.
Do I need to leave space for more snow to follow? Will this be melted and gone by the time we next receive another plowable amount of accumulation?
I parked the Grizzly in the sunshine to melt the snow off the blade while I pulled out a shovel to clean up the edges. That’s when some maple-sicles caught my eye.
The first bites at the bottom are the sweetest and the texture is softer than frozen water. There is no question that these are not typical icicles. The hint of maple flavor is a wonderful natural reward.
I wonder how many grams of sugar I added to my diet yesterday.
That’s not counting the icing I ate on the couple of pieces of Cyndie’s spice cake I snuck in…
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Different Landscape
As predicted, by Friday morning our landscape didn’t look at all like it had on Thursday. While the bulk of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area squeaked by with nary a flying flake, our county rode the sharp northwest edge of precipitation and Wintervale Ranch received a respectable 9-10 inches by the end of the day yesterday.
Taken late Wednesday afternoon.
Taken Friday before noon.
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I took the snowy picture shortly after plowing the driveway in the morning, about mid-way through the duration of snowfall. Tracking the total accumulation involves some guess-work because the ground was so warm that snow was melting from the bottom up. The flakes also settle under their own weight and then the gusts of wind were whipping up some fair drifting.
The National Weather Service report from just south of us was 11 inches and the next reading to our northwest was 9.5 inches. Since we are located between those, and our anecdotal evidence coincides, I feel justified with the assessment I presented in the opening paragraph.
Plowing was a hassle because the bottom layer of the snow was heavy and wet, and the ground was soft from the recent thaw. It led to the blade tearing up bad spots of pavement, as well as the turf on each side of the driveway.
I like snow removal to look neat and tidy, but I was making a mess of things. Also, since I was plowing in the middle of the storm —to turn it into two small efforts instead of one big one— the new falling flakes were piling up as fast as I cleared what was already on the ground.
It didn’t look like a job well-done, but it was perfectly fine for a mid-event effort.
Cyndie had put the horses inside the barn Thursday night in anticipation of the snow’s arrival, which had been predicted to start out as rain. We checked the radar several times that evening, for an indication of the timing of the precipitation’s start, but even though it appeared to already be snowing overhead, it was actually still dry outside on our grounds by the time we went to sleep.
When morning dawned, it was all white outside.
As the blowing and snowing became the obvious order of the day, it got easier to make a decision to stay indoors by the fire all afternoon. I played my guitar until I started to get sleepy. We watched a movie.
It feels a little like winter around here again.
It will be strange come Monday when I drive a few miles toward the cities for work and return to the places nearby that didn’t get the snow. We are now under a completely different landscape for a while.
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Modern Convenience
It was sunny and 60-some degrees at our place yesterday. If it weren’t for the modern convenience of accurate weather forecasting giving us several days warning of an impending snowstorm, I would be completely clueless about what is headed our way. By Friday morning, the view of our property won’t look like this again for a while.
I will not be surprised if the alignment of the storm moving in this evening brings us around a foot of snow, based on the models published by the weather services.
Such a significant contrast of weather in just over a day is something I would not be able to comprehend happening without the present day wisdom, and data gleaned from satellites and radar images. My intuitive senses for interpreting the weather are far too dull to perceive that the warm sunshine yesterday afternoon was so quickly going to become a distant memory.
At the same time, it is still February, after all. It’s supposed to be wintery weather. So I am well prepared for whatever cold and blowing snow may arrive. I have my special leg warmer to keep me comfortable while chronicling the brutal challenges I face when plowing and shoveling the oodles of snowflakes inbound on our position.
Pequenita seems to like napping on my legs when I stretch out. It’s cute, but can’t be all that comfortable for her, and it tends to lock down my posture long enough that numbness sets in.
Maybe she is sensing the oncoming storm and wants to keep me safe and warm in preparation for doing battle when it comes time to dig out.
In the mean time, I hope to spend most of the day Friday in front of a warm fire, watching the flakes fly outside the windows.
See ya later, warm sunshine.
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Tender Footed
Last week, Cyndie mentioned to me that Cayenne looked a little uncomfortable on her feet. The next morning I confirmed back to Cyndie that Cayenne definitely was hurting. I brought out the morning pans of feed for the 4 horses and she didn’t move from her position down in the paddock.
Aware that she was having some problem, I chose to accommodate her and carry a pan down to where she was standing. I stopped one step short to see if she would move at all to get to the pan I had placed on the ground in front of her. She did, one hesitant step.
That morning, the tree trimmers were just pulling in and that startled the herd, sending the other 3 rushing down from the overhang, leaving their rations unfinished. Now they all wanted to eat from Cayenne’s pan. She didn’t move.
I lingered with the horses and watched as Legacy bit her in the butt a couple of times. I couldn’t tell if he wanted her to move, but one theory of Cyndie’s is that he is checking to see if he would be able to make her move in an emergency. It is very important to him as herd leader to know how serious her condition is, which then directs his decision-making, accounting for whatever her limitations may be.
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She was not at all happy with his probing, and let him know in several ways, without ever moving a step. While I was standing with them, I noticed she was yawning frequently and then trying to get bites of snow from the mostly icy ground cover. I considered her usual behavior, which is to get a drink immediately after eating and decided I would offer her a bucket of water in case she was so uncomfortable she didn’t want to walk to the waterer.
That made her happy. She guzzled away at my offering.
Not knowing what else I could do for her, I decided to spend some time cleaning out the waterer while watching to see if her behavior would change. Somehow, while I was focused for a minute on scrubbing green scum away, she stealthily made her way over to the raised circle and was munching emphatically on hay.
It was shocking, because it seemed like I had looked away for a second, and somehow she just “beamed” from one spot to another.
A short time later, I watched her walk up the hill to the hay boxes under the overhang. My analysis was, she was definitely uncomfortable for some reason, but she wasn’t incapacitated by whatever the problem was.
Her behavior wavered better and worse over the weekend, so Cyndie asked the vet to stop by yesterday afternoon. After talking things through with him, our general consensus was likely bruising of the sensitive pads of her feet on the rough, icy terrain of late. This led to inflammation and resulted in her evident pain.
Cyndie had some anti-inflammatory pain-killer to give Cayenne and we are going to monitor for a change in her symptoms. The vet offered some alternative possibilities and decided to take a blood sample to check the function of her thyroid.
Here’s hoping she feels better soon and bruising is the only problem she has to face in this case. It’s tough seeing our most tender-hearted horse be so tender-footed.
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