Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Laying Low
After enjoying a perfect afternoon of lake activity weather on Wednesday when we arrived, things shifted a bit yesterday. The morning was mostly cloudy and there was a steady breeze out of the south, but it was pretty obvious that rain would eventually develop. Planned activities had appropriately been adjusted, and Marco and his sons went to a local golf course with Cyndie’s dad, while Dunia and Cyndie plotted a course of shopping in the surrounding area.
That left me free to spend time putting together a playlist of background music for our summer celebration event tomorrow, before eventually succumbing to a nap that came calling in the quiet of the empty house.
When the golfers returned, the boys headed down to the water, even though it was just starting to rain. Older brother, Marco, managed to lose his GoPro camera in the lake, which led to some creative effort toward retrieving it. The weather hampered their success, so the recovery plan is now hinging on hopes for better conditions to prevail this morning.
We settled on some darts before dinner and then played cards after the meal. For me, the day mostly amounted to a relaxing rest from needing to do any particular activity. I was laying low in preparation for the final push of effort to be ready for our party tomorrow.
We will drive home sometime today, and I will begin the process of mowing grass as soon as possible after we arrive. I’m looking forward to the end of getting ready for the party, and finally enjoying the actual event.
There is just one day left in the count down.
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Seriously Tired
I gotta tell you, this not-working-at-the-day-job thing is incredibly exhausting. Between the shortage of sleep every night and the mixture of home chores and lake place entertainment, I am operating under the influence of some serious tired.
Our departure from home yesterday was late enough that I had a chance to finish all the fence trimming I needed to do before we left. The drive up seemed more laborious than necessary due to several traffic hindering repaving projects underway. We ran into a section where the highway crew had laid down oil on the existing surface in preparation of whatever the next step was going to be, and they then directed traffic to drive on it. What choice do you have at that point?
Shortly after that, we met congestion created by workers painting the lines down the center and shoulders of the new asphalt. It seemed as though we were slowing down as soon as we accelerated out of a previous delay.
With little hesitation after arriving to Wildwood, we donned our swimwear and made our way down to the beach. One sure-fire way to reach serious tired is playing a game of “Last person standing” on the floating RAVE Sports Water-Whoosh. You can’t touch the other competitors as you do everything possible, beyond touching, to knock the other participants down.
Much of the exhaustion comes as a result of the non-stop laughter induced by the game. The rest of the exhaustion is caused by needing to repeatedly climb back up on top of the floating platform. Cyndie captured some fun shots of young Marco and me in action:
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It is a good thing that I am away from home for a couple of days, so I can rest. NOT!
Having a blast can be a lot of work, you know.
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Fabulous Time
What is the deal? Is my camera broken or something? I haven’t taken any pictures for two days, so I can offer no visual proof that our friends, the Morales family, have arrived, or that we have already had so much fun being with them again that little else is receiving our attention.
The one exception turns out to be my stealing any spare second to get after the never-ending task of mowing or trimming grass. I now have just one section of fence left to be mowed before having that whole job complete. I’m planning to sneak that in early this morning before packing up to head to the lake for a couple of days.
We decided to drive two of our cars up there to give me the option of returning earlier than others on Friday to enable me to —can you imagine this?— mow all the lawn grass in preparation for the big knock down, drag out shebang we have scheduled for Saturday night.
Some years the grass growth slows around here in late July and August so I don’t have to mow as frequently, but this year I’m finding that it looks like I need to mow again after just a couple of days. When I wait a whole week, enough grass clippings are created to make me think I should have George bring over his baler.
We are having a fabulous time with our precious friends. Despite their late arrival on Monday night, which had us getting to bed around 3:00 in the morning yesterday, we made it to Hudson in the afternoon for a brief moment of shopping, and a fine patio lunch overlooking the St. Croix river at Pier Five Hundred restaurant.
Later, after a stint of grass trimming, both along the fence and in the labyrinth, George and Rachel Walker joined us for dinner. Marco graciously accepted Cyndie’s invitation to grill steaks, which turned out perfectly delicious. Poor Delilah doesn’t have a clue what happened to her usual sleeping routine the last two nights, as we lingered around the table after the meal, sharing stories and laughter well-past her usual bedtime.
Today, we leave her behind to be cared for by friends for a couple days while we will all be visiting with Cyndie’s parents up at the lake place in Hayward. With any luck, I’ll remember to take a few pictures of the frivolity expected to ensue.
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Good Progress
I’m not quite done with everything I dreamed of doing over the weekend, but I certainly made good progress toward that goal. I would like to finish trimming the weeds along the wood fence of the paddock, and then I’m satisfied that the most visible areas of the ranch look pretty well maintained.
Why do I want it to look good? We’ve got company coming! Our friends from Guatemala, the Morales family, will be arriving around midnight tonight. Then, on the following Saturday, we are hosting a rockin’ party, with an open invite to friends, family, co-workers, and varying levels of acquaintances to come celebrate summer with us and meet our guests.
A number of those who have indicated they plan to come will be seeing our place for the first time. We want it to look nice!
Yesterday, I finished spreading the remainder of the pile of lime screenings, using the bucket on the tractor. It just reached the point where I had done all the tricky parts by hand and needed to finish quickly in order to move on to the next job. The tractor worked well for me this time. I left the horses in the paddock and they patiently tolerated the racket of my back and forth effort on the machine.
While I had the big tractor out, I used the brush mower to knock down some excessive weed growth that the horses have been avoiding in the space between their paddock and the arena area.
I also did some trimming with the power trimmer, tightened all the wires on our fences, cleaned the entry to my shop, swept up the grass clippings on the lawn using the grass catcher pulled behind our lawn tractor, and tended to the daily manure management chore.
In the middle of the day, Julian arrived to help me record a vocal track for a project to which I had been recruited. His mad skills on the recording software allowed us to quickly create a version that was very well received by the person who requested it of me.
It was a long day for me. In order to get it all done, I got up early and then worked through the dinner hour. Getting back to the day-job today will feel like a day of rest, even if it is busy there.
Busy at the office is nothing like busy on the ranch, you know.
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Many Projects
It was getting to be about lunch time yesterday when Cyndie disappeared to get some refreshments. I continued to work in the hot sunshine of the paddock, once again choosing to use hand tools and a wheelbarrow to do a job that deserved the tractor. I get rewarded for that because I enjoy the manual process and I get better results than when working a machine.
Not that I don’t sometimes give in and let our machines do some of the work. After lunch, I cranked up the Grizzly ATV and filled the trailer with assorted tools for some trail maintenance in the woods. I used the chainsaw to cut up a fallen tree on one of our trails, and I revved up the power trimmer to clear the rest of that trail.
Cyndie returned with a picnic lunch which we ate beneath the shade of the gazebo, overlooking the newly sanded round pen, to christen the new viewing station. It will work well for the training Cyndie plans to do there. It is rewarding to finally have arrived at the physical reality of something we have been talking about and envisioning for years.
It was Cyndie’s brilliant lunch-time suggestion that moved our attention to the trail in the woods, in order to get a break from the heavy sweating effort we had been putting in to spread the second pile of lime screenings in the bright sunlight.
I finally broke open the plastic cover on a new pole saw and branch trimmer that I bought for some perceived frantic need a month or two ago. The only use I had put it to up until this day was as a tool to remove a fast-growing wasps nest. It worked well for that, too.
With the new branch trimmer I was able to make that trail into a thing of beauty. I have learned that a simple trick to give the trail a superb visual appearance is to trim the branches that lean across the trail, as high up as I can reach. When I finished, it looked like a hallway in a cathedral.
Next, I was back on the power trimmer and cleaning along the fence line. It became apparent to me that we have more than enough forage for our 4 horses to graze. They aren’t keeping up on their portion of the mowing. I am going to need to cut parts of the pasture again because they aren’t eating enough of it.
After I emptied a second tank of fuel on the trimmer, I switched projects again, and 
moved back to the pile of lime screenings. It was in the shade at that point, and I wanted to get that pile out of the way for the horses. They don’t actually seem to mind it during the day, and someone has been putting hoof prints all over it when we aren’t around, so it seems to me they see it as some kind of jungle gym.
It’s day-2 of the weekend, and we will pick up where we left off last night. More spreading lime screenings, and more fence line trimming. Who knows, maybe even another picnic lunch under the shade canopy.
Happy August, everyone! One day late.
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Temporary Calm
We have arrived at the last weekend before guests arrive and our chance for preparing our place for the big shindig on Saturday, the 8th. I can think of enough things to do to fill twice the time we have today and tomorrow. Luckily, some tasks are nonessential, but involve my wishing the trails and grounds would look optimally groomed.
The secret of things looking good to me involve constant care. Neglecting a trail for too long, and then going in to hack it clear every once in a while does not create the enticing feel that a well-worn path will. We are making good strides to achieving that, but not quite there yet, having been here just under 3 years.
We are still putting energy toward things like getting the round pen surface established (there was enough sand! —barely), and improving the ground in the paddocks. The labyrinth continues to require a fair amount of time, but Cyndie is still in process of getting desirable plants established and squelching the urge of undesirable ones (namely, weeds) to keep sprouting where they have grown for years. I think they’ll learn, in time.
Today, we still have some lime screenings to spread in the paddock, and I hope to trim under the fence lines. We may, or may not, try to get some wood chipping done. Then we could work on the trails, but that will be entering the non-essential work. I guess it means we are that ready for what lies ahead.
It’s calm and quiet this morning, but it’s not going to last. The week ahead for us will be filled with thrills. We can hardly wait!
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Classic Day
We are currently enjoying a string of spectacularly classic summer days. Last night at sunset, the “blue” moon climbed over our horizon in front of a beautifully colored backdrop of sky. The smell of wood smoke from a neighbor’s fire combined with the comfortable temperature, perfect humidity, and almost imperceptible breeze to create an incredibly idyllic ambiance.
It was enough to make a person almost forget that anything could possibly be wrong in the world.
I had wandered down to mingle with the horses after dinner and snapped a few curious images. I really like this odd one that is looking down Dezirea’s neck as she grazes.
I am encouraged that Cyndie has declared we may have enough sand in the round pen after all. I guess I was leaving it a bit deeper than required, so if I can spread it out closer to a 3 inch depth, there’s a chance we can achieve full coverage. That will be one of the priority projects today.
I also have one more pile of lime screenings left to spread over the rills beneath one end of the barn. I’m torn between doing it with the tractor or muscling it with a shovel. The shovel is probably the wrong choice for a job this size, but I’m so much more comfortable with manual control, it’s really tempting.
Comfort just may win out, to match the wonderful weather we’ve been experiencing this week. It’s possible to have more than one “classic day,” isn’t it? I think we’re in for another one, today.
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Wish Granted
Pretty much from the very first day that we assembled the fence panels of the round panel, Cyndie has been wanting sand on the ground in there. We are darn close now. She’s got sand, finally, just not quite enough.
Our source of lime screenings for our paddock, and sand for the round pen, is an excavating company that delivers by dump truck. Yes, that’s the very same company that did the initial damage to our paved driveway over 2 years ago with their heavy truck.
We’ve gotten over that, and the driveway, intentionally neglected ever since, has reached a point where further heavy traffic on it doesn’t seem to make any significant difference. The paddock, on the other hand, suffers quite an impression from the heavily loaded truck.
To save money, and because the excavators don’t have time, we opted to do the spreading ourselves. Their truck can fit through two of our gates to get close to the round pen, but not through the last one, so he dumps it just short of the target.
I was able to leave the day-job early yesterday and quickly jumped onto the tractor seat for my exercise in frustration. It isn’t quite as bad as I make it out to be, because I do move a lot of sand in a reasonable amount of time, but I just haven’t mastered the art of getting that big machine to do exactly what I want, when I want.
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There’s a lot of physics involved when you add a full load in the bucket on the front, which causes the tractor to handle in mysterious ways sometimes. I have a penchant for spinning my wheels more than I like. That ends up creating divots of my own, which I then repeatedly roll into in the process of scooping up subsequent loads. That complicates my attempts to adjust the height of the bucket when approaching to pick up a load, as the up and down of the front wheels alters the level of the bucket.
Repeatedly, in my attempts to scrape the bottom of the pile off the top of the ground, I ended up digging down into the paddock dirt, when all I wanted was sand from the pile. It wreaks havoc on a person’s perfectionism, I tell ya.
With Cyndie’s help on some ground work, I got the bulk of the pile moved inside the pen. It still needs to be spread out better in there, but the pile has been cleared out enough that there is room for them to drop another load that is needed to finish the job.
After that, I moved on to distribute a pile of lime screenings that had been dumped right inside the gate of the paddock. We needed additional lime screenings to fill in the rills that the rain has created on the slope beyond the barn roof. I had to get that pile moved to make room for the dump truck to back in again toward the round pen with a second load of sand.
If we can get that to happen, Cyndie will have the rest of her wish finally granted, and the horses will finally have a layer of sand to do laps on in the round pen. It’s turning out just like we planned!
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Proposed Improvement
I just learned that the FDA is now proposing that companies declare a daily percent value for sugar! That would be a dream come true for me. As thrilling as that news was, the details I found in an NPR piece on the subject, “No More Hidden Sugar: FDA Proposes New Label Rule,” left me a little less ecstatic.
Left: The current Nutrition Facts panel on foods. Right: The label changes that the FDA proposed in 2014 would list added sugars. Now the FDA wants the label to list the percent daily value, too. —image: FDA
At their site, I found a fabulous new version of the nutrition label, which they proposed in 2014. What fun! But, that was last year. Why are we still waiting for it?
Not only is the information better displayed, they want to show when sugar has been added to a food. Include the more recent proposal of finally revealing the percentage of recommended daily amount of sugar in the serving, and you have improved the label dramatically.
Unfortunately, it’s only a proposal at this point. I believe we’ve been here before. The strength of the food industry to control the legislation written by our elected representatives, has proved influential enough to get their way in the past. It is my understanding that this is the reason the percentage isn’t shown for sugar on the labels currently in use.
The NPR article indicates that the FDA will take public comment on the new proposal for 75 days, before issuing a final rule. There is no question in my mind about the likelihood that the lobbyists for the sugar industry will be doing what they do best to further their interests during this time, at the expense of common sense and the health of consumers.
Could this be the time when public benefit wins out over the almighty dollar?
How would you react to a food that has 130% of the recommended daily amount of sugar in ONE serving? It’s out there on the shelves already. You just can’t tell without doing your own calculations. If they want the percentage to look reasonable, but they don’t change their ingredients, imagine how small the food industry will need to make their serving sizes.
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Craving Again
It has been about two months since I watched the movie, “Fed Up,” and decided to do something about the amount of sugar I was ingesting every day. I decided to work on reducing the sugar I was consuming by focusing on nutrition labels and paying attention to serving size and the amount of sugar in each serving. By simply doing that for a little over a week, I noticed a physical reaction and experienced some surprisingly intense withdrawal symptoms.
I think the dramatic physical response helped to bolster my motivation to stay vigilant about seeing this through to a point of achieving a lasting break in the pattern of consuming an unhealthy amount of sugar.
It isn’t easy.
Just when I was beginning to feel as though I was satisfied with the new routine I have established, I discovered a significant resurgence of cravings.
It’s not the first time I’ve been through this. Several times in the past, I have made attempts at not eating sweets. One thing that always happened was a robust urge to eat breads. Even though I recognized that I was exchanging sugar for more complex carbohydrates, I didn’t tend to restrict that urge. I figured the struggle to avoid sugar was hard enough. I didn’t want to take on two things at once.
Well, it wasn’t two things, really. It’s all part of the same issue I’m facing. My blood tests repeatedly revealed my glucose levels to be pre-diabetic. This time, I am working on a more thorough, and a more informed, change in diet. After only a few weeks, I began to notice a reduction in body fat.
I suppose it didn’t hurt that I went on a bicycling trip for a week, and then sweated through the process of putting up over 250 bales of hay.
I also noticed an increasing level of satisfaction from my reduced portion sizes. By regularly making healthy, low-sugar choices, I was discovering a new appreciation for not-so-sweet alternatives. It was refreshing and felt very rewarding. It gave me hope for the possibility of my satisfaction being met by a healthy, balanced menu.
But it wasn’t a cut and dried sure thing. There is a bit of a gray area. There are high and low tides. My diet isn’t rock solid, by any means, and the sweetness I am getting swings above and below the optimum. More than once I have caught myself feeling precariously hypoglycemic.
Then there are the days when the cravings rise up. They can be insidious and particularly tenacious. If I ignore them, they don’t generally go away. I need to work the program. I allow myself some modest treats. There is a slippery slope there, though, and I am cognizant of past experiences where I have succumbed and chose to give up altogether.
I feel like the difference for me this time is that I am better informed. Between my new understanding and the experience I’ve gained in the past, I believe I have the tools and inspiration to endure my cravings and thrive on a healthy diet for much longer than ever before. I hope it’s for the rest of my life.
I need to keep thinking big picture. What I ultimately crave, after all, is optimal health!
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