Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Hays Gang
We got the gang back together again yesterday for a little face-to-face catching up. The five surviving Hays siblings are successful in gathering all in one place every 18 months or so, and we try to capture photographic evidence that it truly happened. This time, we met at Elliott’s house in Richfield, which is mostly central to our distribution of homes to the north, south, and east of there.
It’s mind-boggling to fathom how much life experience has occurred since the time when we would have all lived under the same roof. It would have been in the farmhouse at Intervale Ranch on the border of Eden Prairie and Edina.
At a gathering we achieved in January of 2020, one of our group shots included what has become a meme where Elliott turns his back to the camera. Somewhere, I know there is a shot where he did that at the house Cyndie and I owned in Eden Prairie, but Cyndie’s quick search found this one from 2020:
Here is how we looked yesterday…
It makes us laugh every time.
I LOVE my siblings!
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Never Simple
We hadn’t had a problem with the horse waterer in the paddocks freezing up on us again for enough days in a row that I stopped thinking about it. I still regularly glance toward it to see if there is liquid water in the pans, but I haven’t been lifting the cover to press the float and verify water flows. Temperatures were in the teens yesterday, but there was no direct sunshine.
During the afternoon feeding, I found the pans dry and immediately set about trying to warm the lines with my hands while Cyndie hustled back to the house to heat a kettle of water to pour over the tubing. It has worked simply enough to solve the problem each time it occurred the last times we’ve dealt with this. Of course, since it stopped happening, I didn’t pursue buying a new heat tape for that line. D’oh!
Since we weren’t prepared to be doing this, and our latest snowstorm was just getting underway, afternoon chores were suddenly getting complicated. While I was waiting at the waterer for Cyndie to return, Mia came down from her feed bucket looking to get a drink. It’s an awful feeling to disappoint a horse that just wants a drink of water.
When Cyndie popped out of the barn with the thermos, she was also bringing some water in a scoop she planned to use to clean the waterer. Mia stuck her snout in the scoop and guzzled what she could get out of it. I took the thermos, and Cyndie went in to fill another bucket with water for Mia. It didn’t take long at all for me to get the waterer flowing again.
If the horses keep drinking from it, the line is less likely to freeze at these relatively moderate temperatures simply because of the flowing water that refills it. If there is no flow, freezing occurs. We’ll be bringing hot water with us at the morning feeding.
Then I’ll start clearing snow. Just two days ago, I scraped the nuisance trace of snow off the pavement up by the house.
It’s all buried again now.
One more thing that’s not simple is the trick of prey surviving the threats of predators. We suspect that friendly pigeon we started calling “Plucky” may have fallen victim to a prowling cat or fox. There wasn’t a lot of evidence left, but the wing feathers were a dark color.
The predator got a meal for another day.
Life goes on. Cyndie and I are headed to a somewhat rare gathering of my Hays siblings today for an afternoon of catching up on each others’ stories. It’s my chance to tell them all the things I don’t write in this space.
Later tonight, I hope to take in a little sports spectating in the form of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament game between the USA and Canada. Hockey rivalry much? I have a feeling this one won’t simply be just any old tournament hockey game, given the current state of government affairs.
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Gross Bug
Cyndie spotted a giant dead bug on the floor that looked so gross she went to get some paper towel to pick it up, wondering what the heck it was and where it had come from in the middle of winter.
Upon closer inspection, it was a shard of Velcro that Asher had chewed to bits. Since Asher likes to focus his toothy destruction on the Velcro of his Tearribles toys, we decided Cyndie could try sewing up a toy that is basically just Velcro seams for him to gnaw on. She has yet to test it on him.
I figure we will be seeing plenty more of these kinds of gross bugs lying around once Asher gets a chance to chew on this latest homemade dog toy experiment.
Maybe we will give it to him next week in celebration of his 3rd birthday.
Speaking of birthdays, yesterday was Mia’s actual birthday. I think I’ve written before that Thoroughbreds all have their ages incremented on January 1st each year to simplify grouping the horses for racing. As of the first of the year, Mia turned 25, but the actual day of her birth is February 13. One of the volunteers from This Old Horse, who has developed a special fondness for Mia, stopped by yesterday with a treat for her: a mixture of some sweet feed, carrots, and peppermint.
The other three horses all got a token serving of carrots to munch.
Happy February Birthdays to Mia and Asher!
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Unwarranted Optimism
Overnight Friday, into Saturday, we received a plowable amount of snow. Somewhere between 4-5 inches when it ended on Saturday afternoon. During a walk with Asher on Sunday, I was surprised to discover the snowmobile club had run a groomer along their trail that passes over a corner of our property.
One benefit of having almost no snow the last two winters is that we have enjoyed the absence of the annoying whine of dozens of snow machines racing past our land every hour.
I wondered if the grooming of the paltry amount of snow on the trail meant we would be seeing sleds zooming back and forth again soon. Then I looked across the road where the trail continues over a neighboring field.
Unlikely. There wasn’t enough snow over the cultivated dirt to create a reasonable base. As much as the club members must be longing to get out and play on their snowmobiles, that trail just isn’t ready. I think that grooming the measly snow cover was overly optimistic.
We’ve entered another span of below-zero overnight temperatures that led us to putting blankets back on the horses yesterday. I think they understood the situation and were very accommodating when we busied ourselves around and underneath them to hook latches and thread buckles.
A couple of nights ago, we had the surveillance camera display on the bedroom TV, looking at the horses under the overhang for the sheer joy of being able to watch them. We witnessed Light falling asleep standing up and not locking her knees. It surprised me that the first jolt she experienced didn’t wake her, and she drooped her head right away again and tilted forward so far we thought she would fall on her face. It looked to me like she might have scraped her knees before recovering to her hooves again.
Cyndie did a little research and found instances where nerve damage might make it difficult for a horse to engage the “stay apparatus” mechanism that allows them to relax their muscles and enter a light sleep while standing. We have long suspected that Light may have had her front legs restrained (hobbled) at some time in her life, which could have resulted in long-term issues that seem consistent with the difficulties we’ve witnessed.
Maybe she isn’t getting enough deep sleep sessions while lying down during this period when she is looking to claim the role of overall herd leader.
At first glance in the photo above, it looks like there are just two horses.
Zooming in reveals Mix and Swings doing some deep-sleep napping on their sides.
After consulting with our rep from This Old Horse, we’ve started giving Light some pain relief medication to see if discomfort might be interfering with a healthy sleep routine. I will be paying closer attention to their activity to watch for Light getting a turn for some REM sleep while lying on her side.
Except for the hours when I’m busy catching my own ZZZZs.
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Coincidental Convergence
It started while Cyndie was away for a week in southern California. I entertained myself watching movies that she wouldn’t want to see. As I moved into the genre of war movies, I ended up progressing from WWII conflicts to the Vietnam War. By coincidence, I noticed a documentary series on AppleTV+ narrated by Ethan Hawke called “Vietnam: The War That Changed America.”
It is a fascinating telling by people who were there, on both sides of the conflict, with added context of what was going on at home with the citizenry and political leadership. It is much more than a Hollywood recreation of what happened, but it tends to validate plenty of the acted scenes in the movies I had been watching just days before.
As a palate cleanser, when Cyndie got home, I offered her some episodes of another AppleTV+ series: “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything.” I hadn’t planned the synchronicity, but I quickly realized I was watching footage of the same period of history in each of the shows.
Saturday night, my brother recommended the 2023 documentary movie, “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat, & Tears?” I watched it yesterday and found myself once again immersed in events from the same 1970s era as the previous two documentaries.
It was entirely unintentional but something of a reward. Each one served to add depth to the others.
The impression these all made on me provided a helpful reference for the consternation over the current situation in this country. Being taken back to points in history when people felt the world was teetering on the brink of nuclear obliteration or when public opinion was dramatically split between supporting a war against communism and demands that we bring our soldiers home.
The norms of oppression of minorities and women were being threatened by civil rights and equal rights marches. The youth were threatening almost all of the norms of their parents’ generation. Over and over, people perceived the disruptions as potentially disastrous to society, yet somehow we’ve endured and, in a few ways, even made progress.
It won’t be without some distress and many challenges, but based on how we’ve come through the difficulties this country has faced in the past, we may survive the current absurdities underway and eventually recover some semblance of political sanity.
Think about what today’s weirdness will look like in documentaries that might get made in 2075. That is, if historical documentaries are allowed in the future Christian Communist States of America. In 50 years, how much more money will the top 1% have amassed at the expense of the rest of the world?
That’s not a serious query. Fifty years out is too far for me to imagine. My focus is more like a year and a half from now with the hope that I still get to vote on who I want to represent me in our government.
Spoiler alert: Blood, Sweat, & Tears got forced into a no-win deal by the Nixon administration. That’s what the hell happened.
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Not Buying
Today, I am going to take great pleasure in not buying what the NFL and all of their corporate sponsors are selling. I have an undulating, on-again-off-again spectator relationship with America’s National Football League that started a little before the Minnesota Vikings first made it to the Super Bowl in 1969. Overall, I feel bad for what broadcasting the games on television has done to the sport, even though televised games have provided me with many benefits.
I’ve taken the good with the bad, but it has meant I’d rather stay home and watch than attend a game in person. While the athletes are standing around looking bored during commercial breaks, I can work on my jigsaw puzzle or entertain myself in other ways.
While still on my expedition to avoid news about the political disaster playing out, I saw a report that the NFL had chosen to remove an anti-racism message from the end zones of the field. That’s their prerogative. At one time, they chose to add such a message, and it is their right to stop or change it at any time. There is no requirement that they have to keep doing something forever after they have started.
However, the timing of this decision is something that triggered me and soured my opinion of the league once again. At a time of the kleptocrat-in-chief and all of the billionaires who support his bigoted money-grabbing ways wreaking havoc on society, I don’t want to catch myself chuckling at a creative multi-million dollar commercial during a broadcast on a network I abhor during a game that is hyped beyond reason to be the biggest thing the human race has ever accomplished.
I don’t want to buy the beer or pickup truck or sports gambling app or big pharma wonder drug or snack chips or energy drink or future crypto investment opportunity. I don’t want to know how many times the broadcast will insert a glimpse of Taylor Swift in a suite when Travis Kelce makes a big play.
I also hope to avoid learning which team’s fan base celebrations turn into a festival of drunken property damage.
In its place, I am going to snack on chips and salsa just because I still can. I am going to think about the people who are suffering in the world and gaining nothing from the money being exchanged by corporate advertisers, the NFL, and the FOX broadcast network.
Speaking of snacking, check out the job some critter did on this dead tree:
It munched holes through the snag!
That’s what I plan to do to a bag of tortilla chips later today.
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Unplanned Shots
It was just a normal walk with the dog that ended in a play session in the front yard. Cyndie directed my attention to a leaf standing up on its stem in the snow. The spectacle seemed photo-worthy to me, so while she was tugging and throwing Asher’s favorite outdoor toy, I crouched low to capture the interesting phenomenon.
Not convinced that this was the optimal angle, I repositioned myself to try again. As I did, Asher took interest in my movement. In my haste to get off another shot before he arrived to obliterate the scene, I heard my phone camera clicking off a burst of photos.
As quickly as I could, I leveled the phone for one last try before Asher arrived.
I like how it turned out.
He didn’t entirely flatten the leaf; its stem remained frozen to the ground, but he disturbed the surrounding snow enough to make the scene a much less interesting mess.
To complement the fun photo shots of our natural environment, we’ve also been listening to a lot of catfight sounds the raccoons have been making for whatever reason raccoon conflicts might be occurring. (See: sounds raccoons make during mating season.) While walking through the woods this morning with Asher, I heard a wonderful owl hoot. When we caught up with Cyndie in the barn, I told her about having heard an owl.
She said she heard it, too. She then told me she’d recently read up on the sounds the raccoons have been making, and it said that sometimes a raccoon can sound like an owl screech when mating. That would have spoiled it for me, except we both agreed the sound we heard was not a screech at all. It was definitely a perfect, pleasant hoot, and we’re going to go with it having been an owl.
Our natural world at its finest.
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Just Stuff
When on an expedition having nothing to do with society’s news of the day, one finds things of lesser significance can have a more dramatic impact than they otherwise might. With my mind protected from the gloom of current events during the last few months, I’ve found myself noticing more details about my immediate surroundings during daily walks.
The other day, I noticed some of our trees with an abundance of new shoots sprouting from the lower trunks. My intuition told me the trees were reacting to something, and when I figured out they were all ash trees, I knew what that was. The emerald ash borer is taking a toll on our region, and it seems our turn has come. I learned the new growth is called Epicormic Sprouts, revealing a tree’s effort to survive stress.
In addition, closer inspection revealed birds are chipping away at the outer bark to get at insects beneath. This gives the tree trunks an orange hue that makes them easy to spot from a distance. I was pointing it out to Cyndie yesterday, and we counted a handful of the largest affected ashes. I’ll be watching to see how long it takes them to die.
Meanwhile, we will continue to nurture new growth showing up in our oak, maple, elm, poplar, and spruce & pine tree populations.
This time of year, it is easier to spot the trees that have broken or tipped and are hung up in surrounding branches. The large poplar in this photo is a doozy. That break is probably 10ft(3m) or more up from the ground. I won’t be taking a chainsaw to this challenging widow-maker.
Several trees in the vicinity of that one broke off at a similar height. None of the others got hung up. Must have been an interesting gust of wind to cause that.
A couple of snow flurries ago, our driveway ended up looking rather bovine in appearance.
I gotta tell ya; it’s a lot easier to laugh or be mesmerized by the crazy things I see around me every day while on this expedition of avoiding that which would break my heart and spirit were I to give it a chance. I admit to feeling guilty about having the privilege that enables me to turn away while others must look straight at it all and will be receiving the brunt of abuses underway.
Even as I try to ignore it, there are blips of evidence that get through with hints of difficulties looming for the world.
I’m looking at our stressed forest and laughing at our second snow-starved winter in a row. I’m dreaming of a new shade sail for the horses and marveling over how the four Thoroughbreds are evolving as a herd of rescued former racers and broodmares. Just local stuff must be the focus right now for my fragile mind.
We will be voting with all our might at our upcoming Wisconsin election.
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Trail Shots
That visible trail of wildlife traffic coming onto our property from the north that I thought might be a fox might have been used by a fox at one time, but that is not what is making the path so well established. I staged our trail camera to face the direction and look down to where the traffic was passing beneath our fence.
This is what the camera captured Thursday afternoon through Friday morning, the last image happening about a half-hour ahead of the morning walk with Asher when I retrieved the memory card and turned off the camera:
The time stamps add a lot to the story of this overnight activity. The raccoon photos started at 6:35 p.m. and then at 12:38 a.m., 4:32 a.m., and 6:03 a.m. These are just a partial selection of the raccoon traffic that was happening all night long. Interestingly, there was only a tiny percentage of pictures showing raccoons going in the other direction, leaving our property.
I have noticed raccoons living in a few of our trees, but I had no idea how many are roaming around in the woods all night. Since they likely evade coyotes by climbing trees, their main predator is probably automobile traffic. There’s not a lot of traffic on the roads in the countryside during the hours raccoons are wandering around, and there are more acres of woods than roads, so I can understand how the number of raccoons could get high.
Maybe we should offer hunters an invitation to spend time in our woods controlling the population. A quick search turned up coonskin caps on sale for almost a hundred dollars each. I could post an ad that I’ve got a lot of raccoon fur that I’m willing to give away for free. Interested parties just have to catch the wild raccoons themselves.
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Asserting Myself
It is rare that I feel a need to get aggressive with the horses. Yesterday morning was one of those rare moments. To do this story justice, a little background should be understood, so please bear with me as I prepare the scene.
First off, the wooden fenced area we refer to as the paddocks can be split in two by closing gates. Two of our horses get a larger serving of grain than the others, so we pair them up with Mix and Mia on the small paddock side of the barn overhang and Light and Swings on the large side.
They understand the routine well enough that if they aren’t already in the designated positions when we emerge from the barn with feed buckets, they usually adjust in short order. Up at the overhang, there is a short alleyway between the two paddocks that is passable most of the time. When they are in position to be served grain, we swing two gates 90 degrees to block the alleyway.
Since we will be moving in and out of each side multiple times, usually with our hands occupied, it helps if we don’t need to secure the gates with chains each time. To solve that, we conveniently park the wheelbarrow across the alleyway between the two gates so the horses can’t cross, but we can step our skinny little selves around the gates with minimal difficulty.
Mix and Light in a rare moment of sharing a hay net as if they were BFFs. Whaaat!? Not usually.
I’m usually busy filling the wheelbarrow with manure at this point while Cyndie is serving feed buckets and filling hay nets.
Are you with me so far?
One more thing: each paddock has a gate to the hay field that we leave open. If they want to, the horses can get to the other side when we have the alleyway blocked by walking down past the waterer, out one gate and in the other to disturb the horses eating on the other side. It’s not usually an issue these days because they tend to remain occupied with their own buckets, and walking all the way around isn’t really worth the effort.
It all works like a charm until the horses decide they have a different agenda.
I’ve been on my own for a week, and the horses are well aware of my routine. They’ve been patient with my being able to only do one thing at a time. When I popped out of the barn for the first time, they were all in the right spots for feeding, so I closed the alleyway, cleaned off their placemats, and went inside to prepare the buckets of grain.
When I emerged again, Light and Swings had taken that long trek down and around to now be standing on the wrong side and in the way of Mix and Mia. A power move, for sure, but I was not going to help them at all. I served their grain buckets in the regular spots and left Mix and Mia’s on the ground by the door. All the four horses could do was stare at the grain in frustration.
Light and Swings didn’t take the hint and stood their ground defiantly, so I just busied myself sprucing up their side and filling their hay nets while horses fussed. I was not about to re-open that alleyway for them. They chose to go down and around; I felt they should go back the way they came if they wanted to eat.
When I ran out of things to do, I decided to help them understand what we were all waiting for. I stepped around the gate and energetically pushed them to get the heck out of there and go around. All four horses got riled up at this dance, but it was very easy for Mix and Mia to see that they were not at fault as my attention remained solely on the other two.
It took a couple of loops down around the dying willow and back up before Swings and Light figured out they could get away from my pressure by going through the gate I was directing them toward. As soon as they did, I served Mix and Mia their buckets, and in a blink, everyone was calm and back to grazing.
I think I successfully made my point. For the record, no shenanigans occurred at the evening feeding. ‘Nuff said.
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Relative Something 