Roof Raking
It’s a dose of preventive medicine. I pull snow off the edges of the roof of our house to avert possible ice dams that can cause water leaks. It is a project that looms ominously before I can get to it, as icicles grow to incredible lengths. The work is strenuous to execute, requiring extended time with my arms overhead wrestling the rake into position and pulling it back down full of snow. That effort creates a mess below that needs to be shoveled away after it has compacted into a hard and heavy pile. But when completed, it offers a pleasing psychological reward every time I walk toward the house and spot the cleaned eaves.
I cleared the valley over the front door a day earlier and since then, plenty of evaporation has already occurred.
The toughest part of the whole project is that it only lasts until the next snowstorm.
In the meantime, the absence of concern about out-of-sight water problems is a deeply satisfying reward for the hassles associated with raking snow off the roof.
Since today happens to be January 7th, 2023, I would like to give a shout-out to anyone who happens to become old enough on this date to qualify for collecting their social security funds. Happy Birthday, DRH! Hope you don’t have mountains of snow on your roof up in the northland.
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Wintervale Road
In a day-long deja vu yesterday, it felt a bit like pushing a rock up a hill to repeat everything I accomplished the day before, plowing and shoveling to clear snow from the driveway and walkways. I’m thinking I should change the way I think about that 900-foot ribbon of pavement between the road and our house. It’s more like a road than a driveway. I have christened it, “Wintervale Road.”
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The snowbanks along the edges have officially reached a height too high for my ATV plow blade to spray snow into the ditch. Now the chunks of snow just roll back onto the driveway road behind me.
We aren’t expecting additional snow in the next week, so I catch a break there, but it doesn’t look like temperatures will be warm enough to melt down any of the mountains of snow that have piled up.
I did a little experimenting with knocking down the snowbanks using a hand shovel. It was easier than I anticipated to accomplish good progress but the reality remains that it’s a long road to be doing it by hand. However, in the summer, we worked on pulling up the gravel along the shoulder by hand for the entire 900-foot length, so it’s not something that is beyond my way of making incremental progress.
There remains plenty to be done before I can even think about chipping away on that task. I need to pull the snow off our roof, shovel the piles that develop below, and then plow around the hay shed and in front of the barn.
After that, it becomes a battle of the lure of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle versus toiling away on trimming back the snowbanks on Wintervale Road.
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Looks Pretty
Sure, it looks pretty but that doesn’t mean it isn’t brutal. The freezing drizzle of Tuesday coated tree branches with ice and overnight snow stuck to that ice creating a gorgeous landscape yesterday morning.
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Contrary to the report Cyndie heard from one misguided weather reporter on the radio who attempted to soften the blow of the mounting accumulation of snow by saying it was light and fluffy, I was faced with sticky, heavy snow to be shoveled and plowed.
I didn’t get very far with the plow before the winch rope came off a pulley because of the heavy snow and got wedged so tight I couldn’t get the blade to move up or down. It was back to the shop garage to correct the situation.
I decided to use the occasion to swap out the old, fraying winch rope with a new one I bought recently to have as a backup. While I was reworking things, I also decided to leave the pulley off altogether and route the rope through the tubing of the front bumper. I’m not sure what new problems this setup might produce, but it will for sure eliminate the repeating problems I’ve had with that dang pulley.
My efforts proved sufficient for completing the clearing of the pavement. I left the gravel portion around the hay shed for today.
The snow was so sticky I could only push up to the edge, never up and over. That portion needed to be accomplished by hand shoveling. It got me thinking, after hours of sweat and grunting, that I could suddenly see the attraction of living in a retirement community complex. I could sleep in, take as much time as I want to read the paper, and have breakfast. Maybe spend some time on a jigsaw puzzle. Take a nap in the afternoon. All this while staff was responsible for doing all the plowing and shoveling after snow storms.
I also was thinking that if I was an employee clearing snow at Wintervale when the job got this brutal, I would tell the boss more resources were needed. They need to assign more people to work on the project and give us more time to get it all done. Better equipment might help, too. A skid steer with a loader and snowblower attachments would be great.
Thinking about things like that helps me pass the time as I throw scoops of snow higher and higher over the growing mountains piled around the edges.
I’m not looking forward to daylight when I will be able to see how much new snow fell overnight.
Regardless of how much it is, I’m sure the new snow will look very pretty.
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Brutal Weather
Have I mentioned how much I detest rain in winter? Yes. Yes, I have mentioned it. Yesterday, we got everything the weather forecast promised. Starting with a freezing drizzle that was barely perceptible, beyond the fact the handles of my tools were developing a slippery coating. That transitioned into plain old sleet which then magically turned into a brief spurt of rainfall. Just enough rain to make a mess of everything.
Might as well top that off with some heavy snow, eh? You know, that 1-2 inch-per-hour rate stuff. Luckily, we caught a break as the system spun and our region only received a short amount of that snow before we were graced with a few hours in the eye of the storm, void of any precipitation.
If you were a horse in this kind of weather, what would you do?
After a few days without blankets, I covered the horses back up on Monday while they were dry to give them some protection from the wetness that arrived yesterday. Now, just because they have blankets on, that is no reason to become heedless of the elements.
Apparently, the chestnuts, Light, and Mia, figured they would be protected beneath the bare branches of the dying willow tree in the small paddock.
I have no idea if they noticed it wasn’t doing much toward keeping them dry.
I don’t know what Mix was thinking.
So close. Maybe, once she got her head out of the falling ice/flakes/raindrops, she figured that was good enough.
If I were a horse, I hope I would choose the option Swings smartly relies upon for comfort and well-being.
Dry as can be, which is quite a feat in the kind of weather giving us the business yesterday. The kind of winter weather that conjures up the word brutal in my mind.
Plowing and shoveling was a bitch. It’s heart-attack snow. It’s hurt your back shoveling kind of snow. It is “slip while trying to shovel” conditions. It’s just. Plain. Brutal.
How many days till spring?
Not that I’m counting, or anything. When I was younger, winter was my favorite season.
When I was younger, it didn’t rain in the winter.
When I was younger, brutal just meant a LOT of snow, maybe a little drifting wind. Sometimes really cold. Since I wasn’t responsible for plowing or shoveling as a kid, winter storms were all fun with occasional cold wrists in the gap between my mittens and the sleeves of my snowsuit.
Getting old can be brutal.
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Waste Not
This is my reality: horses waste hay. Not only do I need to clean up their manure every day, but they dump a tragic amount of hay on the ground that I have to deal with, too. I think there is a grass in the mix that they don’t prefer and they eat around it to get bites of something more pleasing to their refined palettes.
I had just filled a hay net that Swings moseyed up to for some post-feed pan noshing yesterday morning. After passing by to deal with other housekeeping around the overhang, I caught sight of all these bites already on the ground.
Really? -_-
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The horses have split their time evenly between the nets and the slow-feeder boxes. They waste about the same amount when eating from either one. Sometimes I find the uneaten hay wadded up and nosed out of their way on top of the grate in the boxes and sometimes they pull it all out and drop it on the ground.
When I showed up to serve the last feeding in the afternoon, this is how it looked:
To maintain my signature pristine accommodations under the overhang, I have taken to raking up all the wasted hay each day and piling it to the side just beyond the overhang.
Here’s the part that gets me: the horses then rummage through those piles (mixed with mud and random bits of manure that get raked up with it) and eat from there. Maybe they are pulling out stray bits of good hay that were accidentally mixed in with the bites they dropped to the ground.
I also notice they like to stand on the piles of hay, I presume for the combination of insulation from the cold ground and the bit of cushion from the surface of packed, frozen sand. It just adds incentive for me to continue clearing it out of my way from under the overhang and letting them have at it in piles on the side.
Since we don’t ration their hay, they almost always have more than enough. Occasionally, I’ll notice they power through a net-full or a bale in the boxes with little to no waste. I think it depends on how cold they are. My take on that is they are showing me the waste is a function of them simply being picky.
I could be wrong. Different bales could come from different parts of a field that provide a mixture of grasses more or less to their liking.
Still, how do you think it makes me feel when they choose to throw their food all over the ground? Waste not, want not.
I run a nice place here. First-rate service. Show some respect, will ya, horses?
Geesh.
Don’t get me started about my beef with them dropping manure all over the place in the dining area. It’s like these beasts were born in a barn or something.
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Hugs
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he still remembers
when she didn’t offer that hug
he wanted the most
loss of connection
can be worse
than never connecting at all
erosion implosion
feeding backward emotion
spirals intertwined
smokily lingering
longer than matters
except matters of the heart
follow special rules
and their own sweet time
quietly divine
energy field lines
spine-tingling kinds
minds can’t forget
what cells still recall
embodied realities
toppling over
in a free for all fall
long after lights out
when dreamland pulls back covers
to mystical worlds
featuring hugs
unconfined
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Day One
‘Twas the first day of the new year and all through the house
the possibilities are endless like the droppings from that dang mouse.
The blessings we are able to enjoy tend to feel somewhat diminished by the harsh realities being suffered by people around the world who live in war zones or are enduring other oppressions. Mice in our house seem like such a minor hassle in comparison.
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The morning frost highlighted horse hair snagged on the overhang support beam that gets used as a scratching post. It also made our evergreen trees look like the flocked white Christmas trees that I always thought were ridiculous when I was a kid. In my limited knowledge, trees weren’t white. Why would they make them that way?
Plenty of life lessons available in that example of limited perspective.
The weather service has put us under a winter storm watch for Tuesday. The first new snow of the year! The old snow we already have is starting to show its age.
The squirrels out our windows are going gangbusters after the acorns under the snowpack.
Sure wish there was a way to harness their energy and put it to good use. I wonder if they could be trained to ward off the mice that get into our house.
Happy New Year 2023!
Free Weekend
Happy last day of 2022! Next year will be an odd year. No, literally, 2023 is an odd number. Duh.
To all you history buffs and genealogy fans out there, this weekend, the Star Tribune newspaper archives are free to view! What’s the first thing I checked? “John W. Hays,” of course.
What I found wasn’t new information for me, since that is also the name of my great-grandfather whom I have searched for many times before, but I had forgotten about this wonderful morsel.
Great-grandpa was a trailblazing cyclist.
08 Sep 1900, 10 – Minneapolis Daily Times at Star Tribune (Minneapolis – St. Paul)
The article was published in 1900 looking back at an event that occurred in 1886 when they road the giant 56-inch wheel.
I have cycling in my blood.
Speaking of wheels, the father of that 1880s John W. Hays was none other than my great-great-grandfather Stephen who lived in Pierce County, WI, and made wagon wheels.
I am such a product of my ancestors.
I hope you will click the link above and check out the article that was beneath that old photo. And, if you are interested in what was in the Minneapolis newspapers going back to 1867, it’s free this weekend at https://startribune.newspapers.com/.
Happy odd New Year tomorrow!
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Sad Outcome
After two days in a row of above-freezing temperatures, the trees have finally shed a majority of the giant globs of snow that were caught in their branches. Unfortunately, it has revealed some of the damage caused by the heavy loads of snow.
That is some ugly pruning. Those aren’t the branches I would have chosen to remove.
As sad as it is to find damage like this, it brings a feeling of admiration for the large number of other trees that survived the hazardous weather unscathed. I haven’t trekked through the woods to do a full assessment yet, but of the trees along the driveway, the one pictured above looked the worst and I noticed only one other tree sporting a single broken branch.
Meanwhile, I tested the camera down at the barn for picking up the WiFi signal from our house and got a not-so-sad result. It wasn’t a complete success but I learned the cameral worked outside the front door of the barn but not inside or under the overhang on the backside of the barn.
If we decide to follow through on the idea of adding a camera that will cover the paddocks, it will likely require the addition of a signal booster or repeater of some sort. Having a camera at the barn is not something we urgently need so the level of a priority compared to a few other projects will probably move this down on our list of things to do.
It’s nice to learn how far the functional WiFi signal from the house can reach, at least. Think about all the “How-To” videos I will be able to consult in the shop/garage during my impersonations of a person who works on power equipment.
It sure is great finally having the fiber-optic cable bringing us the connectivity we’ve been longing for over the past ten years.
It feels like we’ve joined the 21st century.
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Continued Cleanup
Picking up on the opposite end of the backside of our house from where I left off shoveling on Tuesday, yesterday I decided to work from front to back in removing the piles of snow that I raked off the roof.
The temperature climbed up above freezing as predicted but we didn’t see a lot of sunshine which would have made a difference in the amount of melting that occurred. Still, the trees began losing some of the globs of snow stuck in their branches. To my dismay, it meant repeatedly getting splotches of sticky snow slapping down onto the walkway I had just cleared.
Every time I start to feel too much satisfaction over finishing a portion of the shoveling, there’d be one of those unhappy surprises of a new dump of snow on places I just cleaned. In truth, I am gaining on the overall snow-clearing job. I’m getting more areas finished than are getting re-trashed.
In the morning I got the drifts on the driveway and in front of the barn plowed away again. From there, I went directly to the spot in the photo above and then forged ahead onto the deck until only a small portion was left to go. I took a break when our kids arrived for a visit and helped carry in groceries they picked up in River Falls for us. Cyndie being able to shop for groceries online is saving me from one of my least favorite pastimes during these months of doing all the walking and driving chores for her.
Julian helped me figure out the workings of getting the new surveillance camera he gifted us connected through WiFi. We needed to troubleshoot some squirrelly operations where it worked intermittently. Once we figured out the camera could only communicate on 2.4 GHz frequency and our router was auto-choosing between 2.4 and 5.0, we started making good progress.
We changed the router to stop auto-choosing frequencies and separated them to allow for the selection of one or the other. The kids saved me another trip in the afternoon by agreeing to give Cyndie a ride to an appointment, but that meant they had to go before we made it to the biggest test of the camera away from the house.
Alas, it was easy for me to do on my own because we had already solved all the other issues. I walked down to the shop, plugged the camera into power, and brought up the app on my phone.
Ta-Daa!
WiFi signal from the house reaches the shop/garage.
Now I need to figure out a precise location to mount it where I can see as much of the driveway as possible and secure a more permanent power cable. Actually, before I do that, I will be interested in seeing if it will be possible for the WiFi signal to reach the back side of the barn. Being able to see the horses under the overhang would be a real bonus.
It will also drive the need to purchase the next camera that will further our vision of improving surveillance of our property from within the house or remotely on my phone.
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Relative Something 