Archive for the ‘Wintervale Ranch’ Category
Directing Flow
While walking through the muddy driveway in front of the barn I noticed that one of the “fixes” I tried last fall to control runoff appeared to still be doing the job this spring. Previously, the water on the barn-side of the hay shed would flow straight across the drive path into the paddock. I made a little channel at a diagonal across the driveway in hopes of directing the flow toward the far side of the paddock.
With all the snow piled up beside the driveway, there was nowhere for the water to go, so it began to pool up. I grabbed a shovel and set about remedying that situation. While I was working on it, Delilah showed up to help. She had already been racing through the mud that is beginning to appear in several places, so I guess I should be happy she likes playing in the puddles, too.
When it was time to head in, Delilah was a mess. Aaaah, spring. She has already started digging up the dirt that is becoming exposed at the front two corners of the hay shed. She appeared to be trying to get as dirty, muddy, and wet as was possible in the short time she had to run free after I got home and let her out of her daytime kennel.
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Window Replaced
The fractured window beside our fireplace was finally replaced yesterday! It was a long wait, because the glass was a special order, and because the builder’s other projects got pushed back by the harsh winter weather.
At least we had good weather for our task. It was a warm and sunny day here yesterday, with hardly a breeze. With the sun beating down on that side of the house, it was almost too warm inside, so having the window out actually felt refreshingly good.
The old broken window came out without a fight and the new one went in with equal ease. It took as long to assemble and take down the scaffolding they worked from as it did to make the glass swap.
For weeks I have been anxiously awaiting their arrival so I could ask them to look at one of the deck doors that was hanging up on the bottom of the frame. Then, just days before they arrived, I happened to notice something in the shop that held the key to solving the problem. Time and again since we moved here, I have walked past this bag that hung on a nail by the door. For some unknown reason, (trust that intuition?) last Friday I spotted words on the bright pink paper in the bag.
INSTALLER: LEAVE THIS FOR HOMEOWNER
Closer inspection revealed the words: ANDERSEN FRENCH DOOR INSTALLATION/ADJUSTMENT.
In the bag were tools and instructions for adjusting the hinges to re-center the door. I have been suffering with that dang door catching on the bottom for a long time, and wishing it would just fix itself miraculously because I didn’t have a clue how to remedy the problem. Meanwhile, I would walk by that bag hanging at eye-level every time I stepped into the shop.
Using the supplied hex wrench, I tweaked the vertical and horizontal positioning on the hinges of the doors on both sides of the fireplace. Then I hung that bag right back on the nail in the shop. I’m afraid if I move it to a different storage location, I’ll never find it again.
It just so happened that the door I fixed is the one the guys needed to go through countless times yesterday. That made me smile.
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Intelligence Gaps
In the early dark of the first morning after the obnoxiously irritating hour adjustment to Daylight Saving Time, Delilah and I got up and started this day by ourselves. The cats were up, but not being noticeable, and Cyndie was sleeping as if the clocks hadn’t changed. I added wood to the fire and sat down to write, frequently interrupted by Delilah seeking attention.
The melt has started in earnest here and all that accumulation resting on metal roofs was set in motion yesterday, breaking loose and giving in to gravity with startling clamorous reverberations. Scared a few years of life out of Cyndie when it happened on the hay shed while she was inside it.
On the overhang of the barn where we added a gutter to minimize the dripping on the horses, the snow had slid beyond the gutter and was raining down. I had just walked up to tell Cyndie I was going to make a run to River Falls to pick up parts for the lawn tractor, and seeing the problem, grabbed a rake to knock the ice and snow down.
Let that be a lesson to me. I didn’t have a coat on, or a hat, or most importantly, gloves. I knew a little snow might fall on me, but it was a nice day and I took it as a challenge I could manage. What I didn’t anticipate was the damage a little falling ice can do to bare hands. I didn’t notice until I was on the way to town in the car, that my hands had suffered multiple cuts and scrapes. One particularly bothersome spot was missing a layer of skin. Ouch that stings.
While I was looking up at the gutter, and Cyndie was looking down, as she scooped up manure, Delilah decided to harass the horses in the paddock. In our continuing effort to have them learn to accept each other, neither of us chose to intercede on the confrontation. Then we heard Delilah yelp. I quickly turned to see that she looked just fine and was even still hanging around them. I don’t know if she got kicked or not, but we decided it was time to separate them. Time will tell if that will serve as a lesson to her or not.
She can be incredibly smart sometimes, and a bit of a doofus others. She knows that she is not allowed to bring dead animals into the house. We faced off for about 45 minutes one night, she on the deck and me at the back door. If she drops it, she gets to come in. So she drops the remains of this squirrel she caught and I open the door. She picks it back up and I close the door. It’s a wonderful game.
On Friday I saw her running around with the frozen remains of a rabbit, which kept her occupied while I focused on my own projects. As the day warmed up and she gnawed on her prize, I noticed on a subsequent trip between the house and the shop that the rabbit was no longer frozen. I headed in for lunch and in a few short minutes, Delilah showed up at the back door, looking ready to come in.
I opened the door and she immediately checked for the cats and made a circle around the room. I had barely finished closing the door when she stopped on the rug in front of the fireplace and coughed up a big chunk of that rabbit. She had been carrying it deep in the back of her mouth, obviously to be savored later.
I flung that door back open so fast, while shouting out my repulsed objection, that she knew exactly which rule had been broken. Without hesitation, she picked it up and marched back outside.
She’s smart, in that she understands the rule, and connives tricks to get around it, but then she goes and drops it right in front of me! How smart is that?
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Visualizing Success
While our landscape is still locked beneath a thick blanket of snow and the daytime temperatures rise above the freezing point, I reacted upon an urge to give the lawn tractor some long-neglected maintenance attention. The poor thing was caked with dirty, dusty grime and grass clippings.
Opening up the email inbox this morning revealed the timely message from my Stihl dealer detailing how to get those power tools ready for the first use of spring. It’s definitely that time of year. My cycling season can’t be far off!
I opened up the double door between the shop and garage and pushed the old Craftsman tractor, on one mostly flat tire, into the warmer workspace to begin the operation. I’m finally getting around to utilizing that space for the purposes it is so smartly designed to facilitate. The seller of our property kindly provided his stock of spare parts for the machine when we purchased it, so I am set with new air and oil filters, and belts if needed. Too bad that leaves me short a fuel filter, a spark plug, and a replacement bulb for the headlight that has been blown since we bought it.
We may even look into replacing the cracked vinyl seat that was once nicely patched with what looks like electrical tape, because said tape has long since given up its adhesive. Don’t tell anyone, but I will also finally defeat the interlock on the seat so the engine will be able to keep running without interruption when Cyndie bounces up off it when trying to rock the tractor every time it gets stuck.
In all fairness to Cyndie, I have experienced that situation myself a couple of times, as well as wanting to get up off the seat to ride the fender in attempt to better balance the tractor on the one steep part of the ditch by the township road.
Here’s hoping I’ll have the machine running sweetly in advance of actually needing it, without introducing any problems that didn’t exist before I dismantled so many of the vital components. This is a great situation for me to practice the art of visualizing success!
Very early in my life, while hanging around as an extra hand for my dad while he was engaged in any number of similar mechanical repair projects, I came to recognize one common aspect that troubled me. Every job seemed to include, as if by obligation, a moment where some problem arose that would completely impede further progress. One common example was the situation of a nut not coming off a bolt due to corrosion or thread problems.
Such moments are either a wonderful opportunity to rise to the occasion –finding the right tool for a solution, gliding through the uninvited obstacle with minimal disruption– or a disaster of careening down a path of increasing destruction and frustration. Success can be a function of having the right experience and/or keen instincts, and a good inventory of the right tool for the job with the intelligence of knowing how to use them.
I’m pretty sure I developed an aversion to these anticipated obstacles, which leads to the catch-22 of my avoiding them, which creates a deficit of learning how to successfully respond. Since I am now faced with increasing opportunities to delve into mechanical projects that offer potential for just these kinds of lessons, I hope to bring the wisdom I have gained in developing healthy mental perspectives and my ever-expanding awareness of things unseen –recognizing, listening to, and trusting my heart and my gut– as tools to assist me in my learning.
One of the first tools I intend to wield is, visualizing success.
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Spring Things
For the first time in months, I finally got my car washed yesterday. The once shiny blue car was an ugly gray mess of accumulated salty road spray. The temperature didn’t get above freezing yesterday, but it was sunny enough for the March sunshine to be effective at making it feel warmer than it really was. The line at the car wash was long and the wait was even longer, but it felt worth the pause to get it taken care of before the next blast of precipitation starts the accumulation all over again.
There is a real sense of impending change lingering in the air around our place now that the daily low temperature readings are no longer negative numbers and the high temperatures are headed above freezing for a couple of days. The higher sun angle and the later sunset hour are probably contributing the most to the feelings of transition that are upon us.
The horses are already showing signs of shedding their winter growth. Delilah seems to have more energy than ever. Unfortunately, she has started a pattern of barking at the sound of a neighbor’s dog 10-acres distant who sits in a kennel and “shouts” a lot. I’m grateful that Delilah has chosen to just sit on our hill and bark back at the dog, as opposed to run off in search of it.
We think Mozyr has resumed his misbehavior of peeing where he shouldn’t. The other night, he did it on our bed while we were right there, distracted by a video Cyndie had leaned forward to view on my computer. When she leaned back, her hand discovered the wet spot. What the heck!? Now I keep thinking I’m smelling urine in the air in several places, but I can never sniff out a location on surfaces. Even though I almost don’t want to see the truth, we are going to get one of the UV lights that will illuminate the spots where the cats have peed. Obviously, it is important for us to know, but at the same time, I really don’t want to discover what I expect will be the vast number of incidents.
I stopped by the hardware store on the way home yesterday to see if my lawn mower blades had been sharpened and ready for pickup. They weren’t, waylaid by the onslaught of problem snowblowers that had been brought in after the last mega-snowfall. I thought I was being smart to get my blades taken care of during the off-season, when they wouldn’t be inundated with lawnmowers needing similar attention, but it’s only logical that there isn’t really an “off-season” at a hardware store. At least I got them in at a time when I won’t be needing them if the wait takes longer than I expected.
This coming weekend, we move the clocks ahead one hour for the start of Daylight Saving Time, and in two weeks from today the vernal equinox arrives. Spring is here! That means only about two and half months left when we are at risk of getting bombed by a monster snow storm. Isn’t that encouraging!
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Marching Ahead
We’ve made it to the month of March, always a milestone in our northern winters. The other day I noticed that the hour of our sunset has reached 6:00 p.m. That’s a big difference from that shortest day of sunlight in December, when darkness descends way too early in the afternoon. Winter’s days are numbered now, but we know too well from our experience just a year ago, storms with significant amounts of snow can still happen as late as May around here.
With March historically bringing storms carrying large snowfall totals, we try not to get overly excited by the warm sunlight and daytime melting that is about to occur. However, I think this year it will be especially welcome. There have been precious few days above freezing the last few months, which is great for winter sports, but it has me a little anxious about what the melt will be like for us come spring.
Last year the wetness took forever to end. I can’t find any reason to believe it will be any better this year. I had hoped to strategically pile the plowed snow to minimize melt water running where we don’t want it to go, but the amount of snow that has accumulated forced the necessity of piling it anywhere and everywhere.
For now, we still need to keep clearing our way to the wood shed and to Delilah’s kennel. I finally got the path to the wood shed shoveled on Saturday, over a week after the last big storm buried everything here under the rain and then 12 inches of snow.
In March, you never really know if the effort to clear such routes is still necessary, but if you don’t do it, and another large amount of snow falls, it ends up being a real hassle. Better safe, than sorry, I believe.
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Overactive Snowflakes
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It was an otherwise innocuous passing flurry of barely 3 inches of fluffy light snow. Delicate flakes, each one unique, falling in a graceful dance with the air, moving in a randomly synchronized patterned performance. How many snowflakes could there be? They pile up. They land on every available surface, and swerve to reach places not so available.
Yesterday’s snowfall draped itself softly over the wind-hardened drifts in the driveway to complicate an already challenging chore. I had walked over those drifts the night before when I took the garbage bin down to the road. They were packed so dense that I could walk on them without breaking through. It’s like walking on water. It’s just snow, so logic has it that a boot would submerge, but not when it gets packed this tight. Across the top I strolled.
Delilah is finding the latest snow conditions to be confounding. Sometimes she stays above, and sometimes she breaks through. At the speed she is usually traversing, it causes her to do a face-plant into the deep. Then she has to swim a bit to reach a place where she can switch to her deer-like leaps to bounce through the deepest parts.
When the snow stopped falling yesterday, there was plowing and shoveling to be done, again. Those light, teeny flakes that fall from the sky change dramatically when they come to rest en masse. They foil the attempts of machines that try to move them, causing the wheels of the tractor to spin in place against the weight of the snow.
Walking our property has become unthinkable without snowshoes. If I had time to get down to the labyrinth, I would verify that it was entirely invisible at this point, buried beneath the biggest accumulation of the year last week that was followed by the gale force winds and then topped off with the several fluffy inches yesterday.
Snowflakes are beautiful and brutal. I think that’s what makes them great.
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Pee Happens
I have grown to really appreciate my quilt-lined Carhartt bib overalls this winter. They hang at the front door and no matter what I am wearing, I can hop into them to head down to the barn for chores. When I walk in the door in the afternoon, dressed from the day-job, stepping into these overalls covers perfectly for mucking out the barn and feeding the horses.
I ran into one problem with them the other day though, when I discovered the zipper in the fly is jammed and won’t open. I don’t recall if I have broached this subject in the blog already, or not, but since moving to the country, I have peed outside more than ever before. I can pretty confidently report that I never had occasion to pee outside when we were living on a tiny lot in the suburbs.
I suppose it seems acceptable, logical even, to take breaks outside to “water the trees” when exposed (hee hee, I wrote “exposed”) to Delilah and the horses doing it so often. Maybe something in me senses the value of marking my territory.
On Monday, when I was on the diesel tractor trying to finish clearing snow from the driveway and front of the barn, I got the sense my bladder was filling, but I wanted to complete the plowing before taking a break. That was a bad decision.
Of course, the worse the urge got, the closer I would be to almost finishing. If you know me at all, you can imagine me deciding to try to get just a little more snow removed, and then cleaning up one remaining edge. One of the difficulties I have plowing with our machines is that almost every time I move snow from one spot, I spill it on another. I kept not being done yet. I guess for some reason, I decided to torture myself by not pausing and climbing down to pee. I waited so long it was getting painful, which I know better than to do. Why in the world…?
Now imagine how calm, collected, and thorough I was about getting the tractor parked in the garage. It’s a miracle I didn’t crash into something as I rushed to get it put away. Happily, I wasn’t wearing the bib overalls at the time, and I didn’t need to make my way up to the house.
With that incident fresh in mind, my discovery that the overalls zipper was jammed took on greater significance. I intend to correct that situation well before the next time I might have need to use it.
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Good Rest
I was back at the day-job yesterday and it was like a day of rest. I didn’t have to do any shoveling. Wait, I need to clarify that: didn’t have to do any snow shoveling.
When I returned home in the afternoon, I received a message from Cyndie that she wanted to put the horses in the barn overnight because of the return of extremely cold temperatures, and before we moved them in we needed to clean out the stalls. I ended up having to do a little shoveling in there.
The horses have caught on to our routines nicely. They seem very fond of the opportunities to be inside when it gets really cold. We had taken their blankets off last week when it got nice for a few days, but they went back on last night, with no complaints from the horses. We may be spoiling them, but at least they seem to appreciate the care we provide.
I was so tired on Monday night, I fell right to sleep. When I awoke, it felt like I’d had a good night’s sleep. I squinted up at the time projected on the ceiling by the clock next to Cyndie and struggled to decipher what it read, since it was upside down. Did it show 5:11? No, it was actually 11:08. I had been asleep for only a half hour and upon waking I felt like I had slept the whole night through.
Now that is what I call a good rest. Luckily, I was able to fall right back to sleep, and picking up where I left off, I enjoyed a very sound night’s sleep.
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Relative Something 