Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Days Two
Family who slept over Saturday night were treated to a second day of the events of Hays Days, starting with a breakfast of baked double-berry French toast and a perfectly spicy egg bake.
Asher made sure everyone received a warm greeting to start “Days” two.
If they had tented overnight, weather conditions would have allowed them to pack a dry tent in the morning but not if they waited too long. We finally received a small amount of precipitation and I’m not going to complain because a little is better than none at all.
We received just under a half-inch of rain out of a mid-day shower.
Indoor activities included plenty of cutting and pasting for collage projects, then some delicious pasta-making, and ultimately, fabric painting.
It has been confirmed for me once again that an overnight stay increases the connection among relatives at family events dramatically more than just a one-day visit.
I’m not sure what it does for pets. Asher had endless opportunities for human interaction yet he began behaving as if he wasn’t getting enough. What started as one isolated incident of picking up a tossed sock and trotting off with it eventually became a never-ending routine of grabbing a shoe or a shirt or a bag of dice, anything in reach that he seemed to understand wasn’t one of his toys.
At first, I wrote it off as him being out of sorts due to so many new people occupying his living space but after everyone had departed yesterday evening, Asher twice absconded with one of my slippers. At bedtime, after we put him in his crate, he uncharacteristically whined and whined until I finally came out of our bedroom to sit near him and watch Lionel Messi playing for Inter Miami on AppleTV on my laptop.
Asher quieted down immediately. I think he likes Messi.
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Hays Days
Just like all the small-town fairs and carnivals that come up with names like “Schooner Days” (Eden Prairie, MN) or “Rutabaga Festival” (Cumberland, WI), this weekend is “Hays Days” at Wintervale.
Cyndie pulled out a collection of sidewalk chalk and Heidi Shatek created a gorgeous logo for our event. One highlight of the day was a visit from a relative my siblings had yet to meet. We share a great-grandfather because each of our grandfathers were brothers. I met Jim Hays after he contacted me while researching our ancestry. Now most of my siblings got to meet him too.
Another highlight was having our son Julian bring a drone that allowed the easiest group photo we’ve ever taken.
The scavenger hunt I devised worked out slick. I think I had more fun hearing about people finding one of the ten items than they did finding them. “Old metal gate in the woods… three different types of pine cones… carabiner clip in use… two different rain gauges… butternut tree seed pod…”
Asher was in his glory with all the attention and loved being in the middle of the action.
There was no shortage of scrumptious food prepared by loving hands to keep much of the activity close to the kitchen throughout the day. Toward evening, many of the folks needed to head home but two adults and a crowd of third-generation cousins hung around for a sleepover.
Tent camping was considered but the ease of just crashing indoors in sleeping bags won out. There was a chance of rain that bolstered that decision but rain never came. We continue to endure a serious dry spell that has the soil cracking and the dust under kicking horse hooves creating clouds.
As Hays Days winds down today we can turn our sights to another season. Yesterday we announced a save the date for February when the lake place is reserved as the sight of a winter gathering of our clan.
Here’s hoping we boost the numbers to include even more families than were able to show up to this weekend’s Hays Days at Wintervale.
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Pocket Pictures
I don’t understand how my phone is able to activate in my pocket when it won’t do anything in my hand until it identifies my face. Many times I pull the phone out after I’ve been mowing or using one of our trimmers and the phone is in the middle of some activity I don’t even recognize. There is usually a cancel option for me to end the phantom task but I am at a loss to understand how it woke up, opened an app, and began trying to do something.
Yesterday, I pulled the phone out after mowing and my camera was on. No big deal. I swiped the camera app away, got back to the home screen, and pressed the button to put the phone back to sleep. It wasn’t until later when I was checking my photos that I found a series of unrecognizable images and one video that I can only guess were taken in my pocket.
I was wearing green pants, so maybe that’s where that shade of color came from. The second image gives the impression of possibly being a zoomed photo of the one above. There were five images like the zoomed one, then five with the green dots, then a one-second video of the dots, and finally, one more still image of dots.
Makes me long for the simplicity of the good old butt dial. That also has happened in my pocket when I’m working and in thinking about it, I have the same questions. How did it wake up? Why did it choose the phone feature? How does it decide who to call?
I think my smartphone is a little too smart for its own good. How does it wake up and begin functioning without seeing my face or asking for my passcode to unlock?
It doesn’t make any sense to me.
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Over Cooked
I worked outside in the humid heat yesterday for a little too long. My clothes were saturated with my sweat and my fingers were getting pruney even though I’d long ago ditched the gloves that were too soaked to be any good to me. I knew I was pushing the limits of my stamina but I wanted to finish some mowing with the push mower.
As I made my way to the shop garage to put away the mower, I could tell my muscle response was getting rather sluggish. It was past my dinner time and my body was running on fumes. Even my hearing and vision started to waver a bit as I cleaned up the deck of the mower before slowly making my way back to the house.
Before I could even peel off the soaked clothes that were clinging to my body, I succumbed to a powerful desire to lay down for a few minutes so no muscles needed to do any work at all. The cool tile floor of our sunroom fit the bill nicely. What a relief to immediately rest my entire body.
When I did try to move again, my muscles wanted to cramp. Cyndie brought me an iced electrolyte concoction to drink.
I was cooked. Overcooked. Cyndie offered to serve dinner, which I needed, but I was feeling nauseous and asked for a brief delay before eating. Getting out of my soaked clothes was going to feel good but I wasn’t looking forward to the effort it would require.
The reward for that effort came in the form of a shower. It was weird to enter the shower with hands already pruned and then have the pruning intensify. I wanted to make it short because I was too tired to stand for long but our shower has a spot to sit. My body chose to spend a few seconds seated under the spray whether my mind wanted to or not.
The air conditioning has been on in the house for a couple of days and that soon had me feeling colder than I wanted to be, which is weird after being too hot just 15 minutes earlier.
I started the day using our hedge trimmer to clean up the new growth on the natural green wall along our north loop trail. That tool is my new favorite, for sure. We now have two pathways tunneling beneath the branches of our big willow tree.
We got new blades for the little Stihl hand-trimming chain saw so I put one on and cut down some pine branches that were sagging into the pathway. What a huge difference a sharp chain makes.
The clouds have disrupted our viewing of the first supermoon of the month. Cyndie captured an interesting cloud formation on Wednesday that looked downright tornadic when I viewed it on the small screen of my phone upon receiving it from her in a text.
See what I mean?
Looks like we will be waiting for the blue moon at the end of the month for that eery glow illuminating views out our windows in the middle of the night. Cue the howling coyotes…
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Search Worked
Walking Asher unleashed through our woods yesterday, I took a picture of him trotting in front of me because he was so calm and happy. I was even happier because he stayed on the trail and was not manic about the sights and smells constantly vying for his attention.
Shortly after I captured that image, his trot picked up pace and soon he was running out of sight ahead of me.
It was nice while it lasted.
No trouble came from any of his brief excursions out of our sight on multiple sessions of walking with him unleashed. Asher generally explores the woods adjacent to our property and returns within roughly one to five minutes of vanishing. Since he has yet to reliably respect our voiced recall commands, our off-leash walks happen more toward the wooded end of our property as opposed to the open fields near the road.
We do not trust he would know enough to stay away from traffic passing on our street. I suspect just the opposite; he would be inclined to dangerously chase after moving vehicles at this point.
On one of our trails, we passed something I don’t recall ever seeing before.
Do you know what critter makes this?:
There was a half-dozen of them in relatively close proximity.
I added my foot to one of them to give a size perspective.
Just ignore that brightly colored leaf stuck in my boot. [I can’t keep my eye from looking at that distraction.]
Cyndie suggested we do an image search after uploading one of my photos. I figured that wouldn’t work but I was very wrong. She quickly found many photos with striking similarities to this one of mine:
Based on the search, the likely creatures are ground bees. Color me surprised.
I’ve seen bees disappear into a hole in the ground but I’ve not seen the ant-like piles of granules with the perfect pencil-sized hole on top like these.
I learned two things from this. One is obviously the discovery of ground bees. The other is to not doubt Cyndie’s problem-solving prowess.
Married for over 41 years and known her since we were teens in high school. You’d think I would have already learned not to doubt her abilities by now.
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Lots Done
Sometimes I don’t accomplish very much by the end of a day. Other times –I don’t know why– I find myself checking off one thing after another on my list of tasks deserving attention. Yesterday was one of those days when Cyndie and I got a lot done, due in no small part to Asher being off to an all-day “Fit-Dog” session with a canine coach.
Cyndie kicked off the day by putting up a simple fence around my manure compost piles, hoping to dissuade Asher from rolling in them.
Before we started anything else, we decided to give the horses time to come inside the barn again to receive a snack in the stalls. Despite it requiring extra effort to convince Swings to come back out, we agreed it was another successful session. Once they were back outside, they moved out to the hay field which enabled us to close gates behind them so we could put fresh lime screenings under the overhang.
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The horses got a little testy about being locked out of the paddock while we worked and took out their frustration by racing around, which was a treat for us to watch. It looks like Mix is unsure of what to think about the changes we were making.
While I had the tractor in the paddock, I mowed some weeds on one end and then used the bucket to drag washed-out lime screenings back up to fill the area I was doing by hand the day before.
From there, it was just a few gate openings and closings and I was free to mow the back pasture.
Keeping the momentum going, I slipped out the back gate when I was done and made a pass up and down the drainage ditch along our southern border.
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On my way back to the garage, I took a couple of passes with the loader bucket along the gravel drive in front of the hay shed to see if that would be an easy way to tear out the massive weed infestation. Earlier, while moving loads of lime screenings into the paddock, I had forgotten to lift the bucket high enough to clear the ground on the way out one time and it carved off a layer of turf. That revealed a nice-looking patch of the fresh gravel that was underneath which inspired me to try doing that intentionally on the rest of the loop.
The results were promising but if I’m going to clean up the gravel, I might as well put the back-blade on and use that for the purpose it is intended.
With energy to spare, I decided to hop on the zero-turn after parking the diesel and made my way into the round pen to mow down the growth in there.
Almost as good as a putting green, and with sand traps to boot.
We got a lot done yesterday and it sounded like Asher had a good play date at his “Fit-Dog” session. I’d say that qualifies as a double bonus of accomplishments.
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Changing Landscapes
As I so often do, I ended up choosing hand tools over the diesel tractor for reclaiming some of the lime screenings that have washed into the drainage swale in the field beyond the paddocks.
It was just a lot easier to start the task when the moment presented itself, I have way more control over what I am doing, and I could work without bothering to isolate the horses.
The washout isn’t all that dramatic in the picture above, where I had already dumped several loads back on top, but the erosion was beginning to get a lot worse with each batch of heavy rainfall we had been getting. I’d like to interrupt the pattern of increasingly greater washouts as early as possible.
It would be grand to add something like a grid or fabric to hold soil in place but hoof traffic through that space tends to destroy that kind of thing. We’ve got some thick rubber mats under the overhang where we place feed pans and the horses’ hooves do a surprisingly good job of tearing them up.
They have been stomping their feet to knock biting flies off their legs and that tends to bust up their hooves a bit. I spotted a big rock that had recently surfaced on a slope of one paddock. It appeared to have scuff marks on it so I asked Cyndie if it should come out. Her response was, yes, because it can be bad for their hooves.
When I finally pried it out, it fell into two pieces. I think a horse had already broken it by stomping.
I took “before and after” pictures of a different project yesterday afternoon.
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We cleared out this path along our northern property border last year to create our newest walking trail. Everywhere I had cut a tree, new shoots sprouted with a vengeance from the stumps. I hadn’t given this any attention since spring and the weeds and tree shoots were taking over. Now the path is much more inviting.
This coming weekend we are hosting a Hays family gathering that will include a scavenger hunt for one of the events. I now have one more trail where I can think about sending hunters in search of some unique item or landmark.
Cyndie and I have already agreed that no clues will require digging, moving anything large, looking under manure piles, or climbing trees to find designated items.
The scavenger hunt beat out my idea of a treasure hunt where increasingly helpful clues would be provided each time a task is completed. What kind of tasks? I was thinking of things like splitting some firewood, filling in erosion ruts, hauling hay bales, or turning compost piles. The treasure was going to be a seat in our reclining easy chair and a glass of ice-cold lemonade.
See ya this weekend, Hays siblings and offspring!
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Continuing Progress
After lunch yesterday, Cyndie suggested we try giving the horses another opportunity to wander into the barn for the second day in a row. I think it was great timing and resulted in another good experience for all. Even the surprise leap of Asher suddenly popping his face over the half-door to observe didn’t disturb the horses lingering nearby.
The horses milled about calmly and eventually, each one stepped into a stall to nibble the snack we had placed out for them.
The longer the horses linger in the barn without incident the greater incentive we begin to feel to successfully end the exercise on a pleasant note. Ideally, that means letting them make their way back outside of their own accord. Too bad ideals happen less often than we seek.
Something I’ve witnessed with our horses is a very common behavior of ‘almost’ moving all the way through a gate or door when we invite them to and then pausing for [usually] an extended time to look around and take in all the available scenery, apparently undecided about whether or not they truly want to comply with our desires.
As we began to verbally encourage the horses to move back out into the fresh air while all was calm, Swings decided to turn around and take one more look around. I was able to pull the gates closed so the other three wouldn’t change their minds and go back in as well but that led to an imbalance that Mix and Light were unhappy about.
It took the added persuasion from Cyndie who’d stepped inside the barn to convince Swings to join the rest of the herd again. Maybe the anxious whinnying from the two horses outside would have done the trick but I suspect Swings likes having the others fret sometimes and was just fine taking her merry sweet time.
We are optimistic about the horses being fine going into the stalls for the vet appointment in a little over a week and intend to give them even more free time inside before that day arrives to improve the odds.
In another area of continued progress yesterday, Cyndie had Asher off-leash while moving around the property down to the labyrinth where she intended to do some weeding and he did well with it.
I was very happy to find the maple tree we transplanted to the center of the labyrinth was casting enough of a shadow that Asher was able to take refuge from the hot sunshine by pausing (however briefly) beneath it.
Asher also did his darnedest to help Cyndie with her weed-pulling.
Take that image of dirt digging and multiply it by seven or eight and you can imagine how much Cyndie was appreciating his “help.”
It’s progress, but is it good?
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New Visitors
This morning we found evidence of new life arriving overnight down under the overhang.
At least two recently opened eggshells were on the ground beneath the horses. I won’t be the least bit surprised if the many barn pigeons have expanded their numbers. They will share a close birthday with the new robin hatchlings nesting in the branches of the spruce tree just outside our sunroom windows.
Yesterday we spotted the momma bird hopping up branches of the tree with a worm in her mouth and the little heads soon appeared with mouths opened wide.
We also enjoyed a visit from a new connection made at the Tour of Minnesota bike week. After several years of seeing each other on the tour, Scott Skaja overheard me mention having horses and quickly showed interest in bringing his family to see the place one day.
Yesterday was our opportunity before his oldest leaves for college in Florida and we were graced with a beautiful day to roam the property and mingle with the horses while also giving Asher plenty of attention.
The Skaja family was able to witness our experiment with refamiliarizing the horses with the inside of the barn. A vet appointment on the calendar in early August will require the horses to be in the stalls, so we will be offering them multiple opportunities to grow comfortable doing so.
We tried this last year but when Cyndie shattered her ankle in November it interrupted the process and the horses ended up making it through the winter without ever needing to be brought in.
Moving them one at a time when they aren’t sure about coming inside was a challenge I did not want to deal with all alone.
Scott and his wife and daughters stood outside the half-doors to observe how the four horses made their way inside and sniffed around every nook and cranny before eventually finding pans of feed to snack on inside each stall. Cyndie and I felt as though the horses showed evidence of remembering the visits last year and seemed pleasingly comfortable being inside.
It was a great chance to let the Skajas watch the horses explore new things and behave like the big, beautiful creatures they are, including pooping in the barn. Daughter, Bella graciously volunteered to do the scooping up afterward. I took advantage of that momentum to show off my manure composting process.
Not very impressive compared to Cyndie serving up freshly baked scones, a variety of incredibly delicious cold salads for lunch, topped off with a peach pie she baked earlier.
Obviously, Cyndie and I have different areas of expertise.
It will be tough to beat the fun we had yesterday, once again confirming our impressions that hosting visitors is truly what brings our paradise to its fullest splendor.
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Home Happy
I’m still thoroughly enjoying being home again but last night’s dinner of grilled pork chops left over from one of our fantastic meals up at the lake gave me a moment of hesitation as I mentally revisited the greatness of those days.
It’s a rough comparison since my day yesterday was spent sweating over pulling weeds, running the power trimmer, and mowing grass in the tropical heat wave of the hottest July on record. Who wouldn’t prefer to be back up at the lake?
Well, I’m pretty happy being able to sleep in our usual bed with the conveniences of a bedside table. I really like our shower. I’m spoiled by how much room there is, allowing for soaping up just beyond the spray of water. My regular routine of charging my phone and laptop works best with my home setup.
I like having the manure compost under daily control. Once every week or week and a half is just too much work all at once to get piles cooking efficiently again. Getting grass mowed before it gets too long is also a preference.
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After dinner, we walked the trash and recycle bins down to the road with Asher at our sides, making it back with time to spare before the first wave of thunderstorms arrived overhead. That weather came in with an ominous-looking cloud line and a dramatic burst of tree-bending wind.
The brief duration of the heavy downpour was a bit anti-climatic when that ended up being all that happened.
Not that I was looking for weather trouble. Quite the contrary. We already have the makings of a small canyon in the paddocks where draining rainfall has washed away the lime screenings into the main drainage swale. The battle against gravity and moving water is never ending in my quest to best manage runoff.
I’m afraid it’s time to extricate the back blade from the depths of the shop garage for attaching to the diesel tractor to scrape gravel back “upstream.” I was relatively successful the last time I tried doing that but the exercise remains on the fringe of skills I have acquired on the big tractor. It always feels like I am on the verge of making things a lot worse instead of better.
Regardless, we are home and that is making me as happy as it always does.
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