Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Count Down
It’s beginning to feel like minutes, not days, until we depart on our travels to visit friends in Guatemala. Cyndie has done a heroic job of rallying to tend to details both necessary and convenient. I was a bit surprised to see her organizing kitchen utensil drawers before we go, but it was a gesture of thinking about making things convenient for those who will be house-sitting for us while we are away.
Our friend and soon-to-be hostess in Guatemala, Dunia, has been calling and sending photos to prepare us, to inspire our glee, and to share their excitement over having us visit. I need to practice staying in the moment so I will be able to fully absorb every minute we have with them, as I am already sensing how quickly our stay of limited days will pass.
Of course, both Cyndie and I have been heard to tease with our family that we will be gone for only a week and a half, …if we come back.
I am noticing mixed feelings about our preparedness to leave the care of our property and animals to a variety of people, some who have had nothing more than one brief visit to inform their managing of our place. I have no doubts about their abilities to take good care of Delilah, Pequenita, and our horses, but I fret over the complications thrown in by weather events that spring is known to unleash here.
After working frantically yesterday to take advantage of the dryness of the upper levels of the paddocks, raking out the divots created when it was soft and wet, the moisture is due to return today with more than an inch of fresh snow. In the days ahead, our animal sitters will need to think about bringing horses in from the cold and wet. That means creating additional amounts of soiled bedding in the barn stalls that will need to be disposed of in the compost pile.
Yikes! There isn’t much room left in the compost space. On Friday I worked to create space at the front of the compost pile so it would be easier to dump manure while we are gone. There is only one small section that is actively breaking down right now, visible on my new thermometer. I will work to ‘restart’ the other zones of the pile after we return from Guatemala, but until then, the pile is just going to grow.
We have some temporary piles established inside the paddocks to reduce the need to haul manure out while we are gone. If the weather doesn’t get too wet and messy, the cleanup should be manageable. I can hope!
Today, while it snows, I will be trying to figure out where my summer clothes are so I can pack for our trip, while simultaneously struggling to compile the last of the necessary tax information to drop at our preparers office before we go.
The minutes are dwindling, and we couldn’t be more thrilled!
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Stopping Snapping
To most of you who have known me for a long time, my transition to ranch hand and horse wrangler (I’ll hold off on claiming any prowess with a dog for now) over the last two years may seem a bit surprising.
Personally, I feel a bit more amazed than surprised, partly because it all has come rather easily to me. Yesterday, without a hitch, I breezed through a fence repair that had me marveling over how familiar it seemed, for someone having no fence experience whatsoever a short time ago.
With the temperature swings from hot to cold that we’ve experienced lately, our wire fences are looking a little less taut than usual. After long hours at the (now temporary) day-job, followed by a stop at our health clinic for a pre-international-travel checkup, I stepped out to feed the horses and found a wire tension ratchet arcing.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
I think it bugs the horses, so I try not to neglect tending to these when they begin to arc. Oftentimes, oddly enough, moisture seems to bring it on, but this case was caused when the tension reduced over time and the electrical connection from wire to metal ratchet degraded. That results in arcing with creates a build up of carbon, which then reduces the connection even more.
To fix it, I start by turning off the charger and then loosen the ratchet. That allows me to get access to the place where the coated wire runs through the hole in the ratchet. The original installer saved time by not removing the coating from the wire, but the downside of doing that is the likelihood of future arcing. I strip off the coating altogether, creating a connection that is bare wire to bare metal. Works like a charm.
When I finished yesterday’s repair and turned the charger on again, that junction was completely silent.
It was so quiet that it enabled me to then hear a different spot farther down the line doing a quieter version of the same snapping sound. I decided to wait on that one, since it was out on the hay-field where the horses don’t have access for the time being.
Maybe it will be one of those that goes away on its own.
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Strange Bird
We had a strange looking bird perched in the feeder on Monday. Don’t be fooled. This critter can really fly, just not with wings. The birds all fly away when we approach the feeder, but this guy completely froze in order to become invisible to me. Even though his motionless body was hard to spot, the quick shutter of the camera captured a clear image of his unique markings.
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Already Behind
I recently bought a compost thermometer with an 18 inch probe to check the temperature in the center of my composting manure piles. My first test had me worried that the device was broken when the needle moved the wrong direction. I moved the probe to another spot and started to get a positive reading, so it wasn’t a total bust. I just needed to find a true hotspot in the pile.
A couple of days later I discovered why the needle moved the wrong direction. Not only was that spot not warm from actively composting, it was still snow-packed! With daytime temperatures in the 60s (F) lately, I allowed myself to be fooled about how much melting had occurred.
Only the main core of the pile really stays warm in the winter, and even that can go cold if the composting process stalls. Plenty of the accumulating pile on the fringes is mixed with snow when it gets picked up, or the entire pile gets periodically covered with new fallen snow.
When the spring thaw begins, the visible snow is the first to go. It takes a lot longer to melt piles of snow and ice. I somehow was lulled into the assumption that our low amount of snow cover would mean a complete thaw would happen almost immediately.
The transition from winter to spring is a frustrating one for me. In some ways it seems to take a long time, but in other ways it happens faster than I can react. I noticed yesterday that the landscape pond beside our deck was more water than ice. I need to buy a new in-line filter for the water we pump up to a little waterfall.
While walking Delilah, we came across evidence that moles have already begun their activity of tunneling in the lawn. I meant to buy some stinky deterrent to drive them off into the woods and out of our yard. Haven’t done that yet.
Even though we are drying out nicely, there is still a lot of soil moisture, which will be good when it comes to getting our hayfield to grow, but it means we can’t drive around on any of our machines without making deep impressions in the soft earth.
I would like to clean out the winter accumulation of manure in the paddocks, sooner than later, but that is a huge project and it is inviting a muddy battle to drive around pulling a heavy trailer this soon after the melt.
On top of these concerns is the always possible threat that we could yet receive a significant wallop of a winter storm. The example I repeatedly refer to now is the 18 inches we received on May 2nd in 2013. So even though I feel like I am already behind in being prepared for spring, the possibility for additional doses of winter weather still has a high potential to occur for another 6-weeks or so.
It’s crazy-making. Luckily, we have a trip to visit the Morales’ in Guatemala very soon. That ought to take my mind off the concern of lingering snow events for a while.
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Under Represented
I tell so many tales about Delilah’s daily escapades, and the horses are such a powerful commanding presence around here, that our beautiful cat, Pequenita, ends up being too often overlooked. Today she gets some well-deserved air time.
She is a wee little thing, but she knows how to use her claws to get respect when she wants it. That mostly applies to her dealings with Delilah. I’m pretty sure she means it affectionately when she reaches up and hangs her front claws in my pants leg. She likes me a lot so I get that treatment various times throughout each day. Most of the time I am wearing heavy Carhartt pants that have a double layer of fabric over the knee, so she gets away with it.
It surprises her when she tries that maneuver on the occasions I am wearing something else and I recoil in shock over the silly habit.
When I climb in bed at night with hopes of doing a little writing before nodding off to sleep, she immediately shows up in search of some tender loving care. Pequenita tenaciously navigates a position between my eyes and the display of my laptop, and settles in for some scratching and a massage from me.
My efforts are rewarded with a contented purring and handfuls of her hair.
We find her most often perched on our bed in various levels of slumber. Some days I walk in to grab something and she doesn’t move a bit. Makes me question her survival instinct a little that she can fall asleep so hard and ignore activity around her. Of course, all the other times I walk in, she rises from her nap to see what I want and I end up feeling guilty for rousing her when I didn’t plan on giving her any attention.
Most likely, the bedroom remains her preferred hangout because we usually have a gate up to keep Delilah out of there. It becomes a room where Pequenita can relax without a cold nose constantly pushing on her butt. They do continue to improve on tolerating each other’s presence, but Delilah can’t help herself from playfully brandishing her most dog-like aggressive-looking gyrations when she wants to roughhouse.
‘Nita would prefer the game involve a dramatic reduction in the smacking of jaw and baring of teeth. Delilah’s eventual change from that behavior to trying to sniff Pequenita’s butt doesn’t seem like much of an improvement to the cat by that point, either.
When it gets to be a bit too much for her, she retreats beyond the gate and takes a time out. It is not strange to see her choose to return after a very short time, but Delilah rarely figures out that it’s an invitation to try something different, and the scene goes through a bit of recycling back to the over-excited doggy gyrations.
Pequenita is a precious addition to the non-human members of our family. She definitely deserves more attention than she usually receives from us.
Maybe that is why Delilah over does it so often. She is trying to make up for the other periods of attention deficit that Pequenita experiences.
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Hooves Trimmed
Taking full advantage of the quick-dry we are enjoying this March, I was out raking the lime screenings on the upper slope around the barn and picking up the never-ending crop of manure the horses like to deposit there. 
As I often choose to do lately, I had Delilah tethered to an outside hook on the paddock fence where she was doing her best to behave like she was an integral participant in my project.
For whatever silly reason that only dogs can understand, she picked a perch that looked like she was claiming ownership of one of the piles I was trying to pick up.
I was hoping to get the area cleaned up in time for the scheduled appointment to have our farrier/neighbor, George Walker, give the horses their routine periodic hoof trimming.
We are starting to get the hang of the process and for the first time since he has been coming to do this, we prepared by getting a halter on each of the horses and tethering them up near the barn in advance. I give Hunter credit for this bit of wisdom, as he always played hard to get when it was time for his turn. George would be stuck waiting while tried to quickly talk Hunter into cooperating.
Quickly cooperating is not something he is inclined to do, especially when it is our agenda and not his.
Case in point, just getting him into his halter yesterday took 3-times longer than it did the rest of the herd. Having done so, the 4 horses were in an out of the hoof trimming station in record time. The only thing that slows down the process is all the precious gabbing we end up doing while George works.
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Be Careful
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
We dearly wanted to improve the muddy situation that our horses face during the wet spring meltdown. Last fall we excavated an improved drainage swale, cleared out the overgrown drainage ditch along our southern property border, buried drain tile along the uphill borders of the paddocks, and applied several loads of lime screenings on the hill around the barn for improved footing.
We have been anxiously awaiting the thaw to see if our improvements worked the way we hoped. That thaw is almost complete now, and we are standing by to see how quickly the soil dries out.
What we couldn’t control was the amount of moisture we would be forced to deal with by the weather. Our mild winter left us with a below average snow cover and we have been without precipitation for over a week. The effectiveness of our improvements is hard to gauge because the ground is already too dry!
There is still plenty of time to receive some spring rain, but for the time being, we are experiencing what the meteorologists are phrasing as “pre-drought conditions.”
We wanted dryer conditions for the paddock footing, but this is not the way we would like it to occur.
It is interesting that the changing climate seems to be putting us at risk for dryer, drought-like conditions overall, while at the same time unleashing more copious dousings of precipitation from individual storm events. We get too much all at once and then not enough in between.
I am a bit concerned about how that will impact our intentions of growing hay. Over the last two years we have been unable to get more than one cutting in a season, because the spring and early summer have been too wet, and the rest of the growing season has been too dry. We haven’t had enough growth after the first cut to allow for a second batch of bales.
This year we are starting out dry. Who knows what we’ll get in the months ahead. I’m hesitant to wish for more moisture for fear of then getting more than we can handle. Wishes are not to be waved about carelessly. We should be clear about what we want and what we don’t want.
What are the rules again? I can’t wish for more wishes, but can I wish for a precise outcome? Not less than we need, and not more than we need.
Be careful what you wish for.
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Horse Models
Wow, the days sure seem short when you spend 10 of the waking hours commuting and working. When I arrived home in the afternoon, I freed Delilah from her kennel and took her for a short walk to check on the horses. They were calm and serene, which rubbed off on Delilah and she was surprisingly patient while I fed and then cleaned up after the herd.
We found Hunter all dressed up in his favorite colored wet lime screenings for our visit. It looked like he was wearing a work of art.
When chores were done for the horses, I grabbed a rake and walked Delilah up to the high gate into the hay-field. Inside the electric fence, I can let her off leash to get exercise on her own while I work on breaking apart and spreading piles of manure.
The high ground has dried nicely with the last few days of sunny breezes, and we took full advantage of the conditions. Delilah was totally compliant and roamed freely while I worked. To finish off our time, I pulled out a couple of squeaking tennis balls that she loves to chase.
I think she made up for being stuck in her kennel all day during that short exercise, running herself ragged with a noticeable smile on her face and gleam in her eyes.
When we passed back by the barn I found one of the horses missing. Everyone but Cayenne was under the eave munching hay. It is very uncharacteristic to find just one of them so far off on their own, but she was away in the distance, out grazing in the late afternoon sunshine bathing the back pasture.
The other three stepped out to see what I was up to with my stopping by again, and I was able to capture a shot of them with Cayenne in the distance. Don’t they look choreographed? Hold that pose!
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Commuting Again
I’m going to take a little sabbatical from the full-time ranch management gig and go back to the old day-job for a couple of weeks to help them process a large volume of orders they have received. I wonder if I remember how.
I expect the change of environment might reveal how precious my work on the ranch is to me. Being able to spend every day, all day, tending to projects and caring for our animals is a very rewarding experience. Just like everything that becomes routine, it gets easy to lose perspective of just how special that routine can be.
Even though I am often bothered throughout my day with responding to the constant demands Delilah puts on me, I expect that she may be one of the things (that doesn’t sound right, she’s not a ‘thing’) I miss while being away at the work-place.
Yesterday, I needed to make a run to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy, and I decided to bring her along for the ride. She doesn’t usually ride in the car with us, unless on a trip to the vet. To keep from putting her in the kennel (since unbeknownst to her she will have some day-long stints there starting today), I chose to give her an opportunity to ride in the car when it didn’t end up with a vet visit. She got a bonus when the pharmacist tossed a couple of dog treats in with the drugs.
Here’s hoping I am able to help the work-place get caught up, our animals will do okay with me being gone again, I manage to stay awake while driving to and from work, and that I discover how unconscious of my exceptional situation I have grown in the time since I first made the transition back in July.
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Draining Now
It got warm enough to melt a lot of snow yesterday. I was happy to see the drainage ditch we put in last fall is working just like we hoped it would. It’s a bit harder to know how much the drain tile is helping, since it is buried. I don’t see any obvious flow out of the ends yet, but I would assume the ground is still frozen down that low and water isn’t making it into the tubes.
Once all the snow is melted, I expect to be able to see the ground drying out quicker. That will be my evidence that the drain tile is working for us.
Even though I tried to be careful about where I piled snow when I plowed and shoveled this winter, a fair amount accumulated in the areas above the paddock, but downhill from the buried drain tile. The water from that melting snow will flow right into the paddocks. Once all that snow is gone though, there should be little in the way of additional melt-water keeping the ground in there saturated.
The amount of snow we had on the ground this year when the warm weather arrived was much less than we were forced to deal with last year. I consider this a pretty genteel test, in comparison, and am expecting to see good results. Although, there is also a risk that we will end up enjoying paddocks that are too dry, as a result of drought conditions, not just due to our drainage work.
It would be a case of getting too much of a good dryness thing.
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