Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Tough Life
Boy does she have it tough. I’m feeling envious of Pequenita’s luxurious life of napping whenever and wherever she wants.
My activity level has been too busy to get a full night’s sleep lately, let alone fit in a nap. Our weather stayed dry yesterday, so I was able to finish mowing the lawn when I got home from work.
That involved leaving the day-job early, cruising home without delay, and then changing clothes and getting out on the tractor to pick up where I left off on Monday night. It took a bit longer than usual to finish because the grass had grown extra long and thick since the last cutting.
The task was overdue.
While mowing south along the fence line of the back pasture, I spotted a couple of turkey hens and a busy brood of youngsters forging a path that led right toward where I was headed. They made an initial correction away from me into thicker grass that obscured them from view just as I was trying to catch a picture of them.
Eventually, I knew they would have to pop out for a second when they got to our trail, so I kept my phone camera pointed at the little window of path visible from my vantage point. They looked hilarious, but were too far away and their coloring too subdued for the picture to do them justice.
It is such a treat for me to see wild turkeys roaming around here. It makes the place seem a little more rustic, especially considering the alternative of one domestic feline who mostly lays around in the lap of luxury on beds and blankets, resting up so she will have energy to take another nap in the not very distant future.
It’s a tough life she leads, but she handles it oh so stoically.
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Sheer Luck
In the midst of a series of days with unfortunate events, there is always the possibility for a little luck. Sometimes, even a lot of luck. Before I describe my recent brush with some happy happenstance, I will regale you with the latest unfortunate incident that I was given an opportunity to experience yesterday afternoon.
It is probably immaterial to the point, but it means a lot to me and helps provide some reference for how much frustration potential existed in this situation for me to explain that I left work early yesterday to get a jump on cutting the over-grown lawn at home. 
The weather was dry and sunny, perfect for mowing, and that contrasted sharply with the expected weather for the days ahead. Monday was my best bet, so I made it a priority to get home a little early to cut the whole yard all at once.
After completing one pass around the perimeter of the front yard, the mower deck suddenly became very sloppy beneath the tractor. I stopped immediately to check things out, expecting and hoping that a mounting clip had probably come off. That wasn’t the case.
I don’t know why, but one of two mounting brackets on the deck had completely broken off. It was no longer attached at all. End of mowing, just like that. A wave of “It figures” and “What else could go wrong” washed over me.I made two calls: One to “my welder,” Gaylen, who didn’t answer, and one to our friend, George. I guess my first dose of luck was that George was home, available, and willing to try welding the bracket back on for me. This meant that I needed to unhook the borrowed trailer from the truck and go find Cyndie to help me load the deck so I could take it over to George’s.
While disconnecting the trailer, I set a locking pin on the bumper of the truck. Then I forgot about it and drove up to get the mower deck. Cyndie helped me hoist it up and closed the tailgate. I trucked over to George’s and we picked up the deck and put it on the ground for welding.
He worked his magic and successfully attached the bracket and patched up holes. That wasn’t luck. It was good old-fashioned generosity. He dropped what he was doing to help me, and took on a task that required skills and equipment that he rarely uses.
We loaded up the deck and I drove back home, backing into a hill so I could slide the unit off the truck by myself. As I was rolling the cover of the pickup bed back into place, I stepped over the tailgate onto the bumper. The surface felt strange under my foot.
I looked down to find the locking pin still sitting right where I had placed it when I disconnected the trailer. It hadn’t moved a bit, despite my cruising down the road at highway speed, stopping, turning, loading, unloading, tailgate up, tailgate down.
It’s sheer luck, I tell ya.
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Storm Preparations
On Saturday morning, when we realized we should delay our scheduled appointment to pickup hay due to the looming storm, I hung around the barn and hay shed to finish preparing space to stack the new bales. Of course, that is when I made a wonderful arrangement of bales on pallets in the barn, which would eventually need to be tossed aside in a panic to allow the trailer to fit.
As the front edge of the thunderstorm slowly approached, I stepped out under the overhang to check on the horses. Spotting plenty of manure, I decided to go out and clean it up before it got rained on. Methodically toiling away as the heavy weather arrived provided a unique opportunity to witness the horses behavior under the threatening conditions.
In addition to scooping poop, I decided to move fans inside and close the barn door to shut out some of the racket made by the rain on the metal roof. While I worked, the horses randomly wandered down toward the willow tree, out from under the overhang, and then Hunter came back up again.
I should point out that we generally find the horses huddled together in a low spot at the far side of the paddock whenever it is raining heavily. I had yet to witness the actual exercise of them getting there.
It makes sense that they might find the roar of the rain on the roof to be too much, but I keep hoping the opportunity to stay dry might provide inspiration to overcome the noise issue.
Then I spotted Legacy coming up to get Hunter out with the rest of them. The first drops were starting to fall and the initial burst of wind was kicking up. It was quickening my pulse.
I don’t know what the trigger was, but all at once they seemed to realize it was time to go, and together they hustled out toward the bottom of the big paddock. There was a little jostling for position, and then some romping around, but the drill ended in classic form with their butts to the wind and their heads down as the clouds let loose and the barn roof roared.
They made it look so routine, despite the unpredictable drama of wicked weather.
Many hours later, after I had successfully backed the trailer of hay into the barn while the second cloudburst of the day was underway, I stepped out to check on the horses and found them taking advantage of the overhang. And they were doing this despite the clamor of the drops pounding the roof over their heads, just as I’d hoped.
Well, mostly, anyway. Dezirea will often appear indecisive about things and was standing half under shelter, as if she couldn’t make up her mind.
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Unfortunate Events
The day started out so promising. We had an appointment to pick up hay at 10 a.m., and after a run to Hudson to pick up some long tie-down straps, we were in the truck with trailer attached and headed out the driveway. The last weather forecast we had looked at earlier indicated a likelihood for precipitation to begin later in the afternoon, but suddenly the sky looked ominous.
While Cyndie waited to load a view of the current radar on her phone, I practiced backing the trailer up using the side mirrors. There was no question we were about to be hit by a thunderstorm. Cyndie texted our plan to delay until after the rain and I parked the truck.
Then it hit. And hit, and hit. It rained for hours. Finally the radar revealed a break and we checked with the seller, receiving an okay to proceed. With our borrowed trailer and borrowed hay tester, we set off.
It was such a relief to have the reference of a moisture reading to assure us we were laboring over bales worth keeping. It also served to confirm the batch we already stacked in our hay shed was definitely too wet.
The bales on the first wagon we checked were all a little high, so the farmer gladly moved that batch out of the way and I backed the trailer up to the second wagon. The readings were frequently coming in at 14% moisture. Even when Cyndie felt a bale was a little heavy, the moisture reading was still 14%. These bales were just what we wanted.
It felt invigorating.
With the cargo strapped tight, we hit the road and began the trip home. Then Cyndie commented on the dark sky appearing on the horizon. I said it was probably hundreds of miles away. I was wrong.
About three-quarters of the way home, it became obvious a solid line of rain was between us and our hay shed. The dry hay that we were so thrilled to be bringing back with us was about get dowsed. We gritted our teeth and forged our way through varying levels of drenching rain to our driveway.
Cyndie jumped out and opened the barn doors while I did my best not to panic over trying to rush the backing of the trailer into the barn while the rain continued. With only a handful of correction maneuvers necessary, I got it between the doors when Cyndie stopped me.
Earlier in the day, while clearing out space in the shed for our new hay, I carefully stacked some bales on pallets in the barn. The trailer was just making contact with those and the wheels would never clear.
With the rain still coming down, we literally chucked those bales to the side, flopped the pallets out of the way, and backed the trailer in the rest of the way.
In hopes of demonstrating to Cyndie that only the outside of the bales had gotten wet, I suggested she re-test the moisture levels. That was a bad idea. They ALL came up more than double the moisture content!
We put some fans on it and let it sit. We’d had enough disappointment for one day.
Before I made it up to the house, the sun had come out and was shining brightly. How’s that for timing?
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Do Over
Seems like I will be getting some extra practice on trailering loads of hay. Cyndie has been noticing some mold already in the bales we most recently purchased. I noticed that some of the bales we grabbed were a bit heavy, indicating they were approaching problematic moisture content, but turns out even the light ones are high. I’m surprised.
George loaned us a hand-held moisture testing probe to give us a numerical reading on our bales. All of them are higher than we’d like, some being over twice the target range. Wet bales will not only grow mold, they can get hot enough to ignite.
The first time I searched for images of a hay shed when trying to decide what we were going to build, I was shocked that the majority of results were pictures of burning buildings. I guess hay fires are a common reason to take photos and post them. Apparently too common.
I’d prefer not to join that club.
We will be purchasing a moisture tester of our own so we can test bales before we buy. Thankfully, the farmer who sold us these assured us he would take any back that weren’t good, as he can feed them to his livestock. He obviously knew these were borderline high for moisture content.
This year it has been difficult to get a span of dry enough days to optimally cut, dry, and bale. It takes about 4 days in a row without rain. We have yet to cut our field, which is part of the reason the weeds have had a chance to flourish as they have.
So, now we get to re-stack a trailer with bales and drive them back to the farm from which we bought them. First, we have a plan today to drive to a different farm to pick up a new batch.
You can bet we will have the borrowed tester along to check the product before loading it up. Practice is helpful, but I’d rather not have it come as a result of doing things over again that we’ve already done once.
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Two Worlds
In the constant ebb and flow of change that has occurred for Cyndie and me in the almost 4 years since we moved from the suburbs to rural life on a horse hobby farm, there are waves of intensity that can be both invigorating and disorienting. I’m probably just tired from a pattern of not sleeping optimal hours every night, but lately things have been mostly disorienting.
Yesterday, while filling out the schedule of customer orders at the day-job, I received a new Purchase Order with a requested delivery date that I immediately perceived to be past due. Wondering how that could be, I checked the date it was sent and interpreted that as being a week old.
I marched up to the boss’s office to investigate how this could have happened, only to embarrass myself in discovering that my mind was off by a week. The order was sent and received with yesterday’s date and they were asking for delivery next Wednesday.
Never mind.
Obviously, I was not living in the moment. My calibration gets a little off when spending hours of intense mental energy trying to fit weeks of work into limited days of available labor, several months into the future. It gets compounded when trying to do so while simultaneously burdened with trying to self-teach lessons on how to properly (read that as “legally”) load and secure heavy cargo on a trailer.
My poor little brain is surfing on the crest of one of those waves of constant change with regard to the horse hobby farm gig. We have adjusted our hay plans this year to trying to purchase all of next season’s inventory and not use any of what we can cut and bale off our field. This year’s crop on our front field is growing more weeds than grass.
We are negotiating with two sources for small square bales and trying to work out movement of goods. Cyndie called the trailer dealership in town to inquire about short-term rental of a flat-bed. It just so happens that our next door neighbor, John, works there. He said they don’t rent equipment, but offered to loan us the use of one of his trailers. He’s got two of them.
Wednesday night, John stopped by the house to discuss details and I learned very quickly how out of my league I was. When we bought the truck, I didn’t know there was a difference between a trailer hitch and a ball mount. My rather narrow experience from years in industry is in electronics manufacturing. It was intimidating to learn the significance of details involved with trailering commercial-sized loads like the one I already moved last week, which I had done without proper knowledge.
Yesterday, Cyndie took our truck in to have the trailer dealer install a brake controller. Last night, our neighbor stopped by and dropped off his trailer in front of our hay shed.
I’m trying to shift mental gears from the day-job world to the hobby farm world, and reviewing the Wisconsin laws for securing and trailering heavy cargo. We are also trying to plot a course toward improving the crop of hay we hope to grow for ourselves.
Don’t ask me what day it is today. I’m feeling a little disoriented.
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Sand Box
After work yesterday, I went outside to play in our sand box. It wasn’t pretty. There were a few expletives expressed in the execution of the task.
We had an extra load of lime screenings dumped beside the hay shed for use in filling low spots and rills in the paddock. The horses kick constantly in response to flies on their legs and their doing so digs out the area around their hay boxes. The rills on the slope are created by water runoff from heavy rains.
Both issues require trying to get the tractor up the incline to the barn, with a heavy bucket load of lime screenings. I have yet to acquire the skills and knowledge to efficiently navigate the 12 forward gears of the New Holland to get it to go where I want to go and do what I intend to achieve without spinning the wheels and creating almost as much damage as that which I am trying to mend.
It’s crazy-making.
It should be fun, playing in sand with my big tractor. Problem is, it is also a bit dangerous and can be costly.
Right off the bat, with the first scoop of screenings, I got stuck at the bump built up to divert water runoff at the gate into the paddock. I didn’t approach with enough momentum to get over it, and since it is downhill from the driveway, I suddenly couldn’t back up, either. The rear tires just spun when trying both directions, digging me deeper into being stuck with each attempt to coax out some progress of escape.
I ended up dumping the bucket right there and using the hydraulic loader to pry my way out of the predicament, as I have learned to do from my farmer neighbors. It would be nice if I took it as no big deal, but it pissed me off something fierce and set the negative tone for all my subsequent struggles of getting up the slopes to where I wanted to drop loads of screenings.
I couldn’t figure out the right combination of speed and power to make it up the hill with all the weight in the bucket. Halfway up the slope the rear wheels would start to lose grip and I would try to solve it with cursing.
Okay, cursing isn’t an attempt to solve the problem, it is a venting of frustration over having the problem and not succeeding in achieving a solution. But it feels like it helps.
Eventually, enough material was moved close enough to areas where it could be tossed by shovel to the spots most in need. The divots created by spinning tractor wheels were filled in and smoothed. The tractor didn’t tip over or smash into the fence, the barn posts, or the tree.
I got “back to grazing” pretty quickly and shed the negative vibe.
I suppose it’s not all that different from any kid playing in a sand box. Sometimes fun is mixed with frustration. The trick is learning how to deal with it constructively and come out ahead in the end.
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Alarming Rise
In one of the many ways I feel lucky, it is my great pleasure to be able to awaken easily when it is time for my alarm to go off. For that matter, I also enjoy the good fortune of falling asleep relatively quickly, without any trouble at all. It was not always so.
During my years of greatest depression symptoms, sleep was problematic for me. Having that for comparison makes my current pattern of blessed slumber that much sweeter.
The radio alarm clock that I have at my bedside has been my companion for decades. It doesn’t get very much interaction from me, so it has grown a little persnickety about responding to button pushes. I fear that the years of dust it has endured have led to some hesitation of electronic connections.
Recently, I have experienced a recurring pattern of waking just before the time that would trigger the radio alarm to come on. One day last week, in exception to that rule, I snoozed a full 6-minutes past the alarm and decided the volume should probably come up a little bit to better get my attention.
I never tested that because the next two days I was up well before the alarm time. Since I am able to leave it off over the weekend, Sunday night I needed to reset everything. It balked over multiple attempts, but eventually I thought I had it.
Whatever song that was on when I tested it in the evening did not prove to be a good reference for the song that was on Monday morning at the appointed hour. Like usual, I had woken up before the alarm, but it being a Monday, I decided I should linger in comfort for the remaining time before the alarm.
It didn’t take me long to fall back asleep, and it didn’t take a second for me to startle awake to the volume of music that came on the short time later.
Oops.
Maybe it’s time to download a fancy newfangled app for my phone to gently increase an alarm until I wake up. I usually am charging the phone at my bedside every night anyway.
I don’t know if I could do that to the old Sony Dream Machine. It’s like family after all these years.
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Storm Results
I haven’t covered the entirety of our trails yet, but in a partial survey near the house and barn yesterday, I found more trees fell victim to the storm winds than Cyndie noticed on her morning walk with Delilah.
The first thing that caught my attention was a significant branch lying beside the trunk of the large poplar tree near the shop garage. I asked Cyndie if she had moved it there, but she said she hadn’t even noticed it.
Apparently, that is where it landed when it snapped off the very top of the tree. Pretty good placement.
I’d liked to have seen how that worked.
The next thing I found was on the way to the barn. Several dead trees that I should have cut down already had snapped off or simply leaned over into the branches of trees around them. They are now labeled as “widow makers,” a term loggers use to describe, among other things, felled trees that get hung up in the limbs of other trees.
I will probably resort to trying to pull them down with the tractor. I’m not interested in trying to chainsaw a tree that is under tension such as these are.
Beyond that, the most visible evidence of Saturday night’s drama is the amazing number of leaves, sticks and small branches that litter all surfaces that were downwind of the trees.
Upwind, you can’t see any disturbance whatsoever.
We had our bedroom window open when the ruckus happened and I awoke to the forceful sound of the wind. I was prepared to hear a snapping sound at any minute, but never detected one.
It was intense enough to cause me to pull up the radar image on my computer to see if it was just the beginning of something that might get worse, or whether there were any storm warnings for our specific location. We were actually under one of the less intense looking areas, north of the most significant portion of the storm system.
I elected to go back to sleep and let the storm pass without further worry, but not without noting the sound of those gusts.
I’m hoping to combine the intensity I heard with the visual evidence collected of the aftermath to use it as reference for risk assessment in the future.
This won’t be the last time a high-wind storm pays us a visit, that’s for sure.
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Unchecked Growth
It had been a while since I made it down to trim the fence line along the south border of our back pasture where it runs through a grove of trees. Some of the weeds were as tall as me. Yesterday, I made it back down there to finish what I started on Friday, before being interrupted to get hay.
The task was made a bit more tedious than I wished by the presence of some monster thistle stalks, which defy the nylon line whipping away at it. More times than I can count, I had to stop and remove the spool from the trimmer to re-feed the line.
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When I made it through to the end of those trees, it was time to mow the lawn. I didn’t want the growth in the yard to get out of hand. However, there were other influences at play which hampered my completion of the job. The mower engine began to balk. Instead of trying to analyze that situation, I parked the mower and returned my attention to the unchecked growth along the far fence line.
I pulled out the diesel tractor with the brush mower to cut down pasture weeds and then moved to the stressful task of mowing between the fence and a drop off to the drainage ditch, a space that is barely wide enough to fit. I also needed to navigate driving down into that ditch without tipping the tractor in order to knock down the growth that can obstruct the runoff we have worked so hard to facilitate.
Succeeding, with only a couple scares where my weight was shifted to the brake when what I really wanted was the clutch under the other foot, I had the worst of the runaway growth on the far fence line knocked down and the ditch opened up just in time for last night’s wild, windy and rainy thunderstorm.
There are leaves and tree parts shrapnel scattered everywhere this morning!
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