Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Straightening Posts
With my trusty companion, Delilah, tagging along, I lugged tools across the pasture to finally deal with a corner post that had been bugging me for months because of its ever-increasing lean.
Starting with chains and a come-along, I quickly discovered that the angle I was dealing with was compound.
I would need to pull from both directions. There was a problem with that, though. There wasn’t anything to pull against in the second direction.
While Delilah and I surveyed the situation, the neighbors suddenly showed great interest in our presence.
The cows came running up to the fence around their pasture and stared at us expectantly. I think maybe that leaning post was bugging them, too.
Since I couldn’t pull in that second direction, I decided to push. I got the tractor.
It worked pretty slick, although it required a lot of climbing on and off to check the progress. Delilah wasn’t offering any assistance at that point, and I couldn’t see if it was straight from the tractor seat.
Once I had it where I wanted it, there was a long process of trying to pack the soil around the posts to a point that would hold them in place after I released the supporting pressure. In fact, just to be sure, I left the come-along and chains in place overnight, even though I had put the tractor back in the garage.
A little insurance while the soil dries out and settles for the long haul, which I hope lasts for a very long time. Of course, that part about dry soil won’t last long at all. It is supposed to rain again this afternoon and tonight.
I wonder if I packed the soil firmly enough.
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Revisiting Drops
From the Relative Something archives, last night I randomly popped in on March of 2010, from which I have selected a poem for reposting today. With no particular reason in mind, I (re)-present: Dew Drops.
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early today
when it’s hard to decide
whether to stay in bed
or get up instead
and go outside
there is a part of me
that already knows
plan as I might
all the time just goes
somewhere far
away from here
and that one chance I had
up and disappears
like a wispy wet cloud
of dew drops and tears
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.It is possible that my unconscious mind is contemplating the fact that I have a weekend brimming with potential ahead of me, and a simmering trepidation that I might let it slip away without accomplishing much in the way of rewarding results. Or maybe it’s just that I am too tired to think through writing something fresh and new.
I drove George and Anneliese to the airport very early in the morning yesterday, at the expense of a long night’s sleep. Now I’m on my own for the weekend, which could mean I won’t have any distractions and will get a lot done, or it could lead to a loss of motivation that spawns an excessive amount of sloth-ness breaking out.
I feel as though I wouldn’t have any difficulty in framing a few prolonged bouts of sleeping as a much-needed and highly valuable thing to do.
Even as all the time goes and chances to do things up and disappear.
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Rain’s Back
At least we had a week where it didn’t rain on us. Yesterday afternoon, the ground was just starting to show signs of drying out a bit. That’s over now. 
The horses were grazing in a tight cluster under the gloomy sky. I’m pretty sure they had a sense of what was coming our way. The precipitation made a slow approach, prolonging the wait for the inevitable.
I had just the plan for a rainy night. I had volunteered to prepare dinner for George and Anneliese, and I was serving up my specialty. I brought home a pizza.
That meant we could warm up the kitchen by using the oven. But, shhhh… don’t tell Cyndie. I had her favorite pizza delivered to my workplace, half-baked. She wouldn’t want to know she was missing her beloved deep-dish and more episodes of our current tv series addiction, 2007’s “Life” with Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi, and Adam Arkin.
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We’ll keep that secret just between us.
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Sun Basking
This time of year around these parts, when there is warm sun painting the afternoon, you best soak it up to the fullest extent possible. After tending to the horses when I got home from work yesterday, Delilah and I were making our way back to the house and were overcome by an irresistible urge to pause and bask in the glorious warm autumn sunshine.
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After I took a few portraits of her, Delilah said she wanted to take some pictures of me. I gave her the phone and struck a pose.
She said she needed to fix something. My nose was runny.
If I used Facebook, I’d have to update my profile picture with that one.
.It was pretty funny watching her hold the phone in her teeth as she reached up with her paw to touch the button for the photos.
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Soccer Again
Yesterday, Elysa and I got to see the US Women’s soccer team in a friendly match against Switzerland at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
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Once again, we took the light rail train from her neighborhood to the stadium. My vague plan worked out perfectly and we entered the correct gate of the facility to put us directly at our section. For this game, I selected seating on the opposite side of the field from where we sat for the International Champions Cup match back in August.
These seats were also located a lot closer to the field. It was great to be able to hear the chatter from the players as they directed each other during play.
Unfortunately, whatever was used in attempt to mask the NFL markings on the field made for a rather ugly backdrop, but once the action started, I didn’t have a problem ignoring that.
I have very limited knowledge about our national team, and absolutely none about the Swiss, but quickly discovered Switzerland is pretty good. They played smart and executed very well, jumping out to a 1-0 lead and dominating play while putting us on our heels.
The US was able to tie it up after a smashing goal by none other than Carli Loyd before the half was over.
I don’t know what happened at halftime, but the second half performance by the US side was completely different. We dominated play and scored a variety of nice goals, winning the game by a pretty dominating score of 5-1.
It wasn’t until I got home after the game that I read that these two teams had already met in a match held earlier in the week. The US won that one as well, 4-0, so maybe the home team was just playing a little too overconfident during the first half of this game.
Maybe the best thing about the match for me was that it kept me from being able to witness the sad performance by the NFL Vikings in their first loss of the season. Those are just the kinds of games that make me want to stop watching the home team altogether.
A bad game in any team sport is so much easier to watch when it is not my home team that’s stinkin’ up the place.
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That Time
It’s that time again. Now is the time of year when it is very easy to see the common buckthorn leaves in the woods, because they stay green longer than our other trees. Buckthorn is a non-native invasive tree that makes a great hedge, but given free rein, can block out all others here and take over the landscape.
I let the buckthorn get out of hand on our previous tiny lot in the suburbs, so I have first-hand experience on what can happen, and what it takes to eradicate it. Now we have a LOT more property to police, which makes it a difficult thing to control, but I still want to put effort toward keeping it at bay.
There are still a few other plants that also have their leaves, so it isn’t as simple as pulling up or cutting down anything that is still green. Most of them are relatively easy to recognize as something other than buckthorn, but there is one in our woods with leaves that look surprisingly close to those of the buckthorn.
Usually, if I’m not absolutely sure, I just skip over it for the time being. Once you know what buckthorn leaves look like, it is pretty clear when you come upon them.
The saplings are rather easy to just pull out of the ground, and the area where I was working was very wet, so that gave me even more inspiration to try pulling most of what I found.
Some were just too big, obviously ones I hadn’t properly dealt with a year ago to have grown so large. Those I had to cut down with a saw.
The pulling is just so much quicker and more rewarding. I knock the dirt off the roots and dangle them over some nearby branches to wither and dry. Delilah loves to help with the root pulling. She claws away at the dirt and then grabs the roots in her teeth and pulls.
Sometimes we end up pulling against each other.
It is a serious full-body workout to pull the bigger ones. It ends up becoming a challenge for me to see if I can dislodge the next size larger trees by gripping them with my legs bent and then trying to stand up. I need my legs to do the bulk of the work, not my back.
At one point when I felt my legs tiring of the effort, I looked over to see how Delilah was holding up. She was sound asleep in a nap.
Yeah, it is really an exhausting exercise.
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Micro Climates
This morning while walking the trails with Delilah instead of lingering in bed to write this blog post, (because Cyndie is gone for 10-days to Guatemala visiting Dunia and family, helping guide some equine-assisted seminars while there) I was struck anew by how different our property is in as little as a few feet separation.
In the woods, the prominent grouping of trees change from oaks and maples to butternut and poplar. The trail transitions from hard soil to mossy to grassy to muddy to sticks and dirt.
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I paused to take a picture of a spot that grows a beautiful carpet of medium-length grass and Delilah photobombed it. I like it!
Popping out of the woods, suddenly we are walking beside open fields, each that have their own characteristics of differing grasses, prominent weeds, and volunteer trees trying to grow. Of course, we also have paddocks with horses in them.
Cayenne had isolated herself away from the rest of the herd by grazing a spot that dead-ended around the round pen and she was making her way back to the paddock upon noticing Delilah and I approaching. I figured the morning feed was her priority, but when dog and I came around the bend I found her nose to nose with Hunter.
He received her invitation and they set about grooming each other before coming up to eat the morning serving from their feed pans.
Standing with the horses, the muddy trail at the bottom of the hill in the woods seems like it must be miles away.
It is only a minute away by foot.
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Four Years
I was reviewing the “Previous Somethings” archive for some posts that I published four years ago and came upon a picture that means so much to me. During our very first visit in 2012 to see this property with our realtor, I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I hardly took any pictures.
This is one of the few I had for remembering what we had seen, to help me describe the place to family and friends. We had walked a short loop of the trails and I dropped behind Cyndie and Patti while dizzily trying to comprehend what I was experiencing. The place was beyond my wildest imaginings for us.
I came to my senses for a moment and remembered my camera. I captured Cyndie and Patti walking in the distance on a mowed path through one of the fields.
They are walking in a spot that today is about where the entrance to the labyrinth garden is, on their left. The tall weeds on the right are now what we call the Back Pasture, surrounded by a fence.
These are some recent shots of how that spot looks now.
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I get a shiver thinking about that first impression and our visions of the possibilities, combined with the realization of all that has come to be in the four years since.
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Rainy Results
One day later, with the sun shining brightly, I surveyed the results of our crazy mid-summer type of thundershower in October. As I drove in the driveway after work, I could see right away from the car that the grass was laid flat below the culvert.
There was a clear impression of how wide the little runoff river rose after the deluge.
Our rain gauge collected over an inch from Monday night’s dramatic evening cloud burst, and that was on top of a previously accumulated inch that Cyndie had dumped out of the gauge after a drenching earlier that same day.
When we moved to this property, which happened exactly 4 years ago this week, we had no idea the warming climate was going to start dishing out the kind of gully-washing downpours that we have witnessed with increasing regularity each year since.
We have tried a variety of ways to manage the flow —or with regard to the sub-soil, the lack of flow— of water across our land. One trick to reduce the muddiness of our paddocks was the installation of drain tile to help dry out the soil in the springtime, but that didn’t do much to help with the immediate surface runoff of heavy downpours.
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Pouring rains rush down our slopes and carve a multitude of rills around the paddocks below the barn. Dezirea surveyed the sad scene with me yesterday and agreed it kinda sucks.
The geography of our property makes this a difficult thing to prevent, especially since both the frequency and intensity of rainfall have continued to increase since we arrived.
Water will always find a path downhill. The hilly features that we adore so much about this property are also the cause of our erosion problems. We want water to drain from our land, but we would like it to depart with a lot less energy, …preferably leaving all our precious lime screenings behind.
That’s hard to accomplish when the clouds repeatedly unleash inch amounts in spans as short as mere minutes.
Maybe we should look into terracing the paddocks and turning them into rice paddies. Do they make rubber boots that fit horses?
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Startling Storm
I had a ready-made excuse for not working on the chicken coop construction after work yesterday, because rain was falling from the sky. I drove through a couple of heavy downpours on my way home, but it wasn’t raining too hard when I pulled into our driveway.
I must have just missed it, though, because the drainage swale across our pastures was filled with rushing water. Cyndie reported we had received an inch in a very short span of time.
While having dinner with George and Anneliese, something caught my eye outside one of the high triangle windows beside our fireplace chimney. It appeared to be “snowing” leaves high in the sky. A combination of high wind and more rain was stripping the leaves en mass from our trees.
The sky grew dark and Cyndie said she thought it would hail.
“No, it’s not going to hail.” I said. “It’s just looks like this because it’s the middle of October and the sun is low.”
A minute or so after that, it started to hail.
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You’d think I would better know to heed her intuition by this point in our lives together.
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