Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Special Friendship
We are richly blessed this year to have two very precious people sharing our homestead while they are in the process of relocating to Minnesota where they will be closer to family. Our combined situations have aligned such that George and Anneliese are helping us out immensely while we are giving them a temporary home-base for their varied activities.
Since Cyndie’s knee replacement surgery on the last day of November, they have been a key support in allowing me to maintain my early work shift by covering morning chores in caring for our animals. They have also been instrumental in filling in with meal preparations, grocery shopping, and kitchen management.
It has been my saving grace.
Last night, Anneliese surveyed a few recipes and whipped out a spectacular dinner of barbecue ribs, sweet potato fries, spicy beans, pineapple slices and salad. It was a taste of summer on one of the colder nights of the year that warmed our hearts as much as it filled our stomachs and thrilled our taste buds.
We hit the jackpot once again, on the lottery of precious friends. Their companionship during this period of sharing living space together has been so rewarding that we find ourselves longing for them to return whenever we are home alone for too long.
There is a saying that you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family. Well, we seem to keep getting around that by finding friends that very quickly become members of our family.
Thank you, George and Anneliese for taking such good care of us while we are taking care of you!
Isn’t that just the way things should always go?
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Critter Tracks
Monday night we received barely a half-inch of sticky snow, after which the temperature dropped steadily throughout the day yesterday. When I got home from work and took Delilah out for a walk before feeding the horses, there was a very clear display of fresh tracks in the snow that obviously had been created within the roughly 16 hours prior.
The vast majority happened to be easily identifiable as rabbits. I was actually surprised by the significant volume of activity attributable to the little rascals. What do they eat in the winter? Whatever it is, we must have a lot of it and they must be thriving this year.
I was about to declare rabbits as the only animals moving around yesterday until we reached about three-quarters of our travel to the barn and came upon some tracks from much smaller feet. I’m thinking they were probably squirrels or chipmunks.
Then we came upon some wonderful artistry from a little mouse or mole that was splitting time between treading lightly on top of the crust and burrowing some vivid designs through the snow.
I wonder what he was trying to spell out.
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As we turned the corner around the back pasture on our route to the barn, I noticed how the sky revealed the departing weather system that had delivered the small amount of precipitation we received. Behind it are the clear skies that make way for our descent into very cold temperatures.
The next few days will involve single-digit highs and below zero lows.
It’s a little bit like what January is supposed to feel like around these parts.
I may have to start wearing a coat again.
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Hay Preference
As if I needed any additional evidence, our horses have reaffirmed my suspicion about their dissatisfaction with one of our hay sources. Unfortunately, it happens to be from the supplier closest to home. So close, in fact, I was able to just hook up to one of his hay wagons and pull it down the road at 25 MPH to our driveway. It’s not just the miles, it’s a huge advantage of not needing to toss and stack hundreds of bales an extra time.
The other suppliers we used last summer required us to acquire a trailer and involved the stacking and strapping down of bales for much longer trips.
Exhibit A:
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On the left, you can see what is left of the bale they like. This is a typical morning result. Pretty much nothing but dust left on the bottom of the box.
On the right, they have picked at it and pulled out what they could grab, then distributed it on the ground or nosed it out of the way on top of the grate in search of the possibility there will be something better deeper in the box.
I took those pictures yesterday morning. After returning from the lake, I got fooled about which bale was which in the barn, because our house-sitter had been so thorough as to replace bales I had set out for her. Turns out she replaced them with ones from the side of the hay shed I hadn’t been using.
When I initially loaded the boxes, I didn’t realize I had used the unpopular bales. Sunday night, I purposefully filled the one on the left with a bale I knew they liked, with a plot to see if results might be any different from the last time I tried mixing the bales.
I would say they have very consistently demonstrated their opinions about the bales from our closest supplier. This was the first time we purchased hay from him, and we have no knowledge of what it might be about his hay that our horses don’t like. The grass looks really good to us, with very little in the way of weeds. They don’t smell suspicious to us, but the horses have showed me multiple times that they can sense it in an instant with one whiff.
Could he have used a chemical fertilizer or pesticide that they don’t like? We will ponder how to best inquire about specifics when we next have an opportunity to visit with our neighbor regarding his hay.
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Rain Results
We are back home on the ranch and I am walking Delilah across the slippery, crusty snow on our trails again. It is interesting to see how the water from the rain on Christmas day continued to flow beneath the snow on a journey to lower terrain. There was enough pressure behind the draining water to push it up over places where water before it had reached open air and froze, thus creating slippery mounds of ice across trails in several places.
It appears that the majority of the rain water that pooled up in our drainage swale and the lower areas of our back pasture and front hay-field has frozen in place.
Looks like I could create a little skating rink of my own right here at home.
While the trails in the woods have now frozen pretty solid, there are many spots where it is easy to see the remaining evidence of the layer of water that was underneath the snow.
My foot prints from tromping through the mess last week are now frozen proof.
It’s going to take a significant snowfall to fill the hollows of my boot prints and cover the slippery hard packed pathways left behind after that unseasonal Christmas thunderstorm.
Unfortunately, that kind of weather event isn’t showing up as likely in the weather forecast for the week ahead. That means the footing will remain treacherous for walking the dog.
Maybe I should look into a sled I could sit on so she can pull me around on her walks. It would be a good distraction for her to have a purpose other than sniffing every molecule of evidence left by critters who have shared the trails with her in the recent past.
It is pretty obvious by her behaviors that there are many of them and they are leaving their scent on branches as well as in the tracks they leave behind.
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Night Games
Cyndie’s brother, Ben, and his kids came up to join the fun and quickly set about creating a rink on the lake. After shoveling to create edges, Ben got out a hose and flooded the surface to improve it for skating. With daylight short, the incentive to add lighting was enough to inspire a shopping trip for supplies.
It’s pretty classy. Too bad (said with plenty of sarcasm) I didn’t bring my ice skates.
It has been so long since I skated that the arches of my feet would scream with pain if I suddenly hopped on some blades at this stage of my life.
After helping get things set up and running, I headed inside for warmth and appetizers before dinner. There is no comparison for the comfort of coming inside to food and warmth after acquiring a substantial chill outdoors in the winter.
And appetizers have an extra appeal when one has inadvertently skipped eating lunch earlier in the day. I tagged along with the crowd to town yesterday and sat through an animated feature film in place of a mid-day meal.
The matinée flick didn’t hold a candle to the spy thriller that has been occupying my attention otherwise this week. Watching that has been pretty much the extent of my night games while we’ve been up here.
Today, we head back to the ranch where we will celebrate the dawning of 2017 with our animals.
Good bye, 2016.
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Vacation Disorientation
It’s a bit dizzying to compound my vacation escape from routine by also burying myself in a memoir while simultaneously binge-watching a spy thriller 6-episode series. What day is it today? Where am I again? Who am I?
I’m certainly not at Wintervale anymore.
We are up in the woods of northwest Wisconsin. Yesterday morning, as I was comfortably lingering in bed after waking up, I spotted a deer moving through the trees outside our window. Then there was another, moving slowly across my view, pawing and sniffing at the ground as they went.
As I watched, the first one suddenly laid down for a rest. A while later, more deer moved into view, and one by one, they curled up in the snow by the first deer. Eventually there were five of them, and they ended up spending most of the day there, despite a small bit of activity in and out of the front door of the cabin as the hours passed.
I like that our little nook is a spot they find to be comfortable for spending their day.
Meanwhile, I’m reading Robbie Robertson’s “Testimony” and finding my mind ensconced in the 1960s music scene that he describes. Between chapters, Cyndie’s parents have us watching the short series, “The Night Manager,” which involves lavish views of exotic places where thrilling intrigue is at play.
Of course, I submerge myself in the identity of each leading character, so by the end of the day, I have lost myself to being a mixed up compilation of people who are definitely not me.
It feels a little bit like being on vacation.
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Sharp Teeth
Our precious house-sitter, Mckenna, is taking care of our animals for a few days while we have escaped to the lake place for a mini-vacation between Christmas and the New Year. This region received similar weather to what we experienced at home on Sunday, so the terrain is very icy. Cyndie will remain confined to the cabin where she will continue her regimen of exercising her new knee.
I made a brief solo exploration of the properties and shoreline, did a minimum of cleaning the walkways and steps, and then power-lounged in front of the fireplace with a new book. I also played some guitar, sketched a new sculpture idea, and spent time sanding/shaping a work-in-progress with the help of some new jeweler’s loupe magnifying glasses that I got for Christmas.
It was a good start to unwinding for a few days. I could get used to this.
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The lake is almost clean enough to skate. In fact, there were some kids out doing just that on Tuesday afternoon when we arrived. I found a frozen pine cone and a lone fish house on the otherwise desolate ice-scape yesterday.
Arriving to our lagoon, I discovered the handiwork of some busy beavers with very sharp teeth.
It’s wonderful to know we have wildlife this close to our vacation home, but it is devastating to see our trees being destroyed by them.
They probably think the same thing about us when we build our houses along their shoreline.
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Not Fun
You know that part about me driving multiple times to Cyndie’s parent’s house for Christmas events? Didn’t happen. Chalk this one up as “Worst. Christmas. Ever.” for me. At least I didn’t have any problems with trying not to fall asleep behind the wheel.
A dastardly nasty spell of weather foiled my best intentions. We experienced sleet, rain, freezing fog, lightning, thunder, heavy rain, and as a cherry on top, high winds with scarily intense gusts. My Christmas was spent home alone. I might as well have been a character in the movie.
Knowing the impending freezing rainstorm would wreak havoc on roads, we headed out on Christmas eve prepared for Cyndie to stay the night at her folks’ house. I drowsily made my way home through the beginnings of the freezing mist on Saturday night so I could take care of Delilah and the horses.
Sunday morning dawned with a perfect glazing over everything, quickly convincing me I wouldn’t be trying to drive to the cities for the grand gift exchange extravaganza that Cyndie’s family executes with incredible flair. Actually, it was Delilah who convinced me, as she did an immediate slipping-on-a-banana-peel spill off the front steps before she realized the hazardous conditions.
I could have tried to warn her better, but we all know she wouldn’t have listened.
The horses were way out in the hay-field, happily grazing through the snow, so I left them out in the mist for much of the day. The temperature actually climbed a bit, melting some of the glaze by afternoon, but you couldn’t see the difference between frozen and not, which made it doubly dangerous.
I navigated my way around our property by changing my gait to something that looked like I had aged several decades over night. Even with that adjustment, there were still frequent moments of heart pounding panic as I’d catch myself from going ass over teakettle.
By the time it had turned to real rain and become obvious that I needed to get the horses inside for the night, I was fighting both them and the elements to accomplish the task. They stayed out in the field while I prepared their evening feed in the stalls. They made me trudge out in the soaking wet to guide them back to the barn.
The wind howled something awful all night long, making my longed-for uninterrupted night’s sleep an impossibility. At some point around zero dark thirty I figured out the spooky clunk that kept occurring was from a bird feeder hitting the house outside the bedroom. I wasn’t about to get out of bed to do anything about it at that hour, and in that wind, so I just had to get used to the sound enough to ignore it and get back to something close to restful sleep.
Yesterday morning presented with a diabolical combination of standing water (much of it hidden beneath cover of snow), freezing temperatures, and continued strong winds. The slopes around the barn were coated with very slippery ice. I tried spreading sand over them before offering Legacy a chance to bring his herd out for the day. He stopped and surveyed the surroundings, put his nose down to the icy surface, and then turned around to lead me right back into his stall.
They would spend the day indoors.
Cyndie ended up spending another night at her parent’s house. Delilah did well with the crazy weather, too confused by the inclusion of thunder in December to even bark at it. She happily agreed with me to cut our walks to the shortest distance necessary. She and Pequenita became my silent companions, waiting out what nature was serving up, clueless to the joyous family gatherings I was missing.
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She braved the gales with me to inspect the drainage ditch that is backed up a bit with a mixture of snow and water.
It’s going to take some time to get back to decent snow conditions around here, but probably not as long as it will take for me to quit moping about my sad fate this holiday. Only 363 days until I get a chance to replace this year’s Christmas memories with new ones.
Here’s hoping we end up with better weather next year.
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