The Race
As unlikely as it seems, one current feature for me of being up at our beautiful lake place is the access to television channels we don’t receive through our antenna at home. The Tour de France bicycle race is of most significant interest to me this time of year. Yesterday, we lucked out with an incredibly dramatic series of race moves in the mountains during stage 11 of the race.
There was a classic series of attacks on the leader in the yellow jersey, Tadej Pogacar, by riders on the Jumbo-Visma team that forced him to expend extra energy to respond to each sprint. By the time the riders reached the last monumental climb, Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visa rider who was 39 seconds behind the leader at the start of the day) seized his opportunity for the ultimate attack on the yellow jersey at about 5km from the summit finish on col du Granon.
Not only did he make up the 39 seconds to claim the yellow jersey, Jonas put 2’22” of time between himself and Tadej. That’s HUGE!
This morning, my broadcast access to stage 12 is going to be time delayed, so I will avoid the news and watch the taped version in the afternoon to preserve the excitement of what happens today. After the monumental effort yesterday in the mountains, it is hard to imagine how these riders get any decent sleep and then get up and compete at the same level for another grueling mountain stage, let alone for all 21 stages of the race.
I plan to take a leisurely stroll on my bike this morning and then watch the racers do battle from the comfort of the couch this afternoon.
Last night we were treated to a gorgeous moonrise over the lake. Cyndie stepped out to capture a picture of our view.
We are having a wonderful time. Wish you were here!
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Gone Again
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Guess where we are now. Here’s a hint:
There is no lake in that photo but the lake place is where we are.
Yesterday morning, while the excavators were picking up where they left off the day before on ripping up the old driveway asphalt, I was rigging up the bike carrier on the back of Cyndie’s car. We drove over the freshly dumped gravel until we reached the backhoe at work and then took to the grass to get around it.
Two and a half hours later, we were up in the north woods.
Wasting no time, we walked our mini labyrinth in the woods, had lunch, went to the beach, swam in the lake, I took a cursory spin on a standup paddleboard, played a card game on the deck (CrossCrib!), and binge-watched the end of season 1 of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime while eating dinner and later, ice cream for dessert.
We are definitely up at the lake.
I gotta say, Clarkson’s Farm has totally swallowed my brain. I think it was really well produced. I only knew Jeremy Clarkson in passing, by way of having spotted him when channel surfing past episodes of the Top Gear or Grand Tour programs he co-hosted. After getting to know him as a bumbling novice farmer with money to burn, I can say my impression is very mixed. Part of me definitely likes him. All of me doesn’t like parts of him that come across in this humorous documentary series.
However, the supporting characters in the adventure are wonderful and the challenges represented are completely relatable. It definitely throws me back to all the firsts we’ve encountered when taking on the care of animals and management of rural property. Our situations are muted in comparison to his dealing with 1000 acres and growing crops using all manner of agricultural machinery, but plenty of the sentiments are familiar.
I think back to my not understanding the terminology of components of a trailer hitch, trying to figure out how to rake hay into windrows using my diesel tractor, or raising chickens with zero previous experience and I feel like Clarkson’s Farm could just have easily been Cyndie and John’s Big Wintervale Adventure.
All we needed was a top-notch camera and sound crew on hand 24/7 to record it all.
Actually, I’m really glad that never happened.
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Driveway 2.0
Our next big project is now underway. We have committed to spending too many of our hard-earned saved dollars to fix the driveway that has been crumbling since the first few months after we arrived here. That was almost ten years ago. In the ongoing saga of our adventure of leaving the suburbs to create a sanctuary of rural bliss that we call Wintervale, this improvement on the land might be the least important but the most visible.
The old dilapidated pavement was still driveable, but it looked completely neglected (it was!) and was becoming increasingly more of a nuisance by the day. Smooth new asphalt will be a joy to have and it will make this place look even more amazing than it already did despite the lousy driveway surface.
We are contracting with two different companies that have worked together many times before. Yesterday, the excavating company that has supported us on multiple projects in the past, started the process of removing the old asphalt from a majority of the length. Specifically, the portion just above the shop garage all the way down to the road.
The asphalt company will overlay new pavement on top of the old asphalt in front of the shop garage and up to the house where little deterioration was evident.
After the excavators pulled up the first chunks of asphalt, they deduced the material used for the base looked like it was not as coarse as they recommend and it was not applied as thick as it should have been, especially in the low area where wetness and our clay soil combine to create a potential for problems.
Watching the process was mesmerizing for me. I stared in wonder like a little kid. The man operating the backhoe was an artist, deftly manipulating the controls to efficiently pull up and then break chunks of asphalt in one smooth motion.
After the first load of broken asphalt was hauled away, the truck returned with a full load of gravel to slowly pour out over the length of the excavated section. Then, that truck would be positioned beside the backhoe to receive more removed asphalt.
Eventually, a second truck showed up with gravel and joined the rotation. By quitting time, they had torn up about three-quarters of the length. They should be able to finish the entirety of their portion of the work before the end of the day today.
The asphalt company has us on their schedule to start next Monday with their work. When the quote was made this spring, the man said it would be best if they could lay the pavement during the hottest days of summer. It is looking good at this point with high temperatures in the 90s°F expected.
When your driveway is 900 feet long over two rolling hills, it becomes a significant feature of the overall property. I’m really looking forward to having ours updated to a new and improved version 2.0.
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A Speck
Cyndie has wowed me with another sky pic. I have cropped it to exclude the ground, leaving a spray of thin clouds smeared across the blue with a half-moon all lit up in broad daylight.
But there’s more.
Up near the top there is a speck that she hadn’t noticed at the time. I tried to brush it off my screen.
A high flyer soaring almost out of sight.
For as inconspicuous as it is, I think it disproportionately adds a lot to the image composition. Even though that dark spec barely catches my eye, knowing it is there provides added depth for me.
Or, I’m just thinking too hard. I simply like the image she captured. Down to the last speck.
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What Priorities
Looking at the topic of mass shootings from this perspective really struck me this morning.
Sorry. We’re all out of mental health care.
Ouch.
Back up from the point a person is in need of professional health care and consider the years that led up to it. Every little action and experience contributes to our future selves. Day after day after day. We make our future by how we choose to behave today. Parents, you are molding your children’s future health.
What are our priorities?
Imagine a world where we focused our resources on education and family health, working to reduce poverty and inequalities for all people.
Sending love to all who are struggling or in crisis. There is no quick fix but if a person spends whatever limited energy they can muster on choosing a healthy option instead of an unhealthy one this day and then does so every day after that, improvement is made possible.
Maybe that will buy the 90-week wait time for access to talking with a professional.
Or not. Where are your priorities?
I vote we seek to enable a better world.
Prioritize HEALth! Love yourself enough to show yourself love. Loving ourselves is the first step to loving all others.
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Full Day
I didn’t set out to put in such a long day yesterday toiling away on big accomplishments, but circumstance allowed and I achieved much more than I thought possible. Cyndie was occupied in the kitchen canning jam with the help of her mother in the morning so I was on my own working outside. Since I got home from my bike trip I’ve intended to take the chainsaw to the large limb that broke off a big maple tree beside the back pasture.
I was eyeing that task while walking Delilah in that back pasture and pulling weeds that were getting tall. The dew point temperature was high and it was going to be a sweaty day in the great outdoors. Delilah likes being out with me so I picked the weed-pulling for her benefit before it got too hot. While walking the field, I sensed it would be mowable if no additional rain fell during the day.
That left me with two significant projects competing for my attention. I decided to start with the chainsaw on the downed limb. It was one of those cases where the more branches I cut and pulled out, the more branches it looked like remained. By the time I found myself soaked in sweat and exhausted, I had a mess of tree shrapnel, cut logs, and limbs for chipping to clean up. I began to think I may have bitten off more than I could chew.
Time for a lunch break in the air conditioning!
That renewed my energies and I immediately set out to finish and clean up my lumberjack work. Without a moment’s hesitation, I brought out the diesel tractor to take on the pasture mowing project.
Starting very slowly along the fence, I completed the full circumference before kicking up the speed to see if I might be able to cut the entire pasture before rain or darkness stopped me.
I made good progress navigating the Ford New Holland around the corners and recesses. Cutting at a different angle than the last time to improve results, I triumphed within minutes of the dinner hour.
Two large tasks knocked off the to-do list in one day, with credit given to Cyndie for being able to take on the afternoon horse feeding and dog walking that allowed me to mow uninterrupted to the end.
Color me extremely satisfied this morning with such progress achieved in just one day.
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Ravaging Varmint
We received a wonderful multi-colored lily as a gift last year and Cyndie planted it in the ground outside our front entrance to the house. It was one of the first plants to sprout from the ground when the snow melted away this past spring. It brought us both great joy when the flower blossom appeared.
Isn’t that just wonderful?!
Well, yesterday, this is the scene Cyndie unexpectedly stumbled upon:
Not looking so wonderful anymore, eh?
What critter would not only dig up such a beautiful flowering plant but toss it away like a piece of unwanted trash?
The most likely trouble makers we suspect are squirrels or chipmunks. We’ve seen both marauding in the vicinity of the once glorious lily.
We’ll see how hardy the lily turns out to be. Cyndie replanted it.
I may need to spend some extended time lounging on the front step. My slingshot hasn’t had any chances to come out a play for quite a while. We can find out who is more patient, them or me. If I sit still long enough, me thinks they might just forget I’m there and I can apply a little consequence for their ravaging behaviors.
Vengeful? Who, me?
In this case, a little.
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Slowly Advancing
I love slow-motion replays. When I was little, I wanted so badly to be able to perform an athletic maneuver in slow motion while playing football in the yard. The closest we ever came was playing in the winter in deep snow surrounded by the padded insulating layers of our snow pants and jackets. We didn’t fall any slower but the landings were softer. It was easier to pretend we were moving in slow motion.
Watching radar images of advancing thunderstorms is a different version of slow motion. We can see it coming, but can’t do anything about the ultimate timing of arrival. It’ll get here when it gets here… if it doesn’t use up all the energy before then. My favorite MPR weather blog pointed out a whopping 86°F dew point in Iowa yesterday afternoon that combined with a 90°F temperature to create a heat index temperature of 121°!
That seems like the kind of extreme heat that could cook up some impressively stormy weather.
Yesterday morning at our place felt rather otherworldy. We walked out into a landscape that looked like we no longer had any neighbors. Our high dew point temperature was making it feel remarkably tropical. There were so many droplets falling from the tree leaves it sounded like it was raining in the woods. A thick fog was obscuring the view of anything beyond our property lines.
Days like this strain my senses to reconcile how dramatically different it is here during the frozen desolation of winter. I don’t tend to think about the changes between those two extremes as happening in slow motion, but obviously, the transition takes months.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about another thing changing in slow motion. It came to my attention via some television programs that included scenes of life in Europe in the 1930s and the early episodes of fascist intimidation. It is hard for me to imagine what that was like in light of the knowledge of where it led and the ultimate atrocities that transpired. It makes me want to shout at those people in history to not let it happen.
It causes me similar discomfort to witness rhetoric and animosities happening in the present day that has an eery similarity to 1930s Europe. There are moments when I experience the uncomfortable sense that I am living during the beginnings of a slow-motion transition away from democracy and acceptance toward an intolerant and authoritarian political philosophy.
The politicization of the US Supreme Court feels so wrong and shows no signs of reversing course. The long game being played by those who sought to reverse the law allowing women to choose to have an abortion by electing a president who would appoint judges to achieve their goals is very much a version of slow motion.
It disturbs me to witness the slow-motion trends happening in the present given the outcomes of authoritarian intolerance that played out multiple times throughout the world in the past.
It’s a jarring contrast to the innocence of my dreams of slow-motion leaping and diving in real-time when I was a kid.
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Berry Season
It’s a little later in the summer than what we have experienced over the past ten years, but we aren’t complaining. Wild black raspberries are showing up all over our property this week. This is made more thrilling by the fact we lost many bushes to a rust fungus that is extremely contagious. Over the last two years, Cyndie has dug up countless plants in an attempt to limit the spread to adjacent bushes that showed no signs of disease.
To offset the losses, Cyndie has been working to establish a patch of red raspberry bushes that aren’t susceptible to the rust disease. Unfortunately, the deer liked the spot where she planted them and munched off the tops of the plants before they could flower. No red raspberries showing up now.
With the black raspberries now ripening everywhere we turn, it would be wise to always bring a pale along on our daily dog-walking excursions. Berry picking can spontaneously occur at any time when the berries all ripen at once.
Cyndie has found that her efforts to cover the entire property when the season is at its peak could become an endless loop. By the time she returns to the place she started, more new ripe berries appear and she could just keep on going round and round again.
In contrast, her strawberry patch is all in one place. The biggest battle there seems to be a resident squirrel with a taste for the fruit. In classic squirrel behavior, this varmint tends to just take a bite out of each berry it can reach instead of eating just the entirety of one. Maybe it is trying to lay claim on as many as possible with the intent of returning later for a larger feast.
As much fun and sublimely delicious as it is to get fresh strawberries from our own patch, Cyndie says there aren’t enough to fulfill her desires for her massive jam-making extravaganzas. When she returns from the holiday weekend at the lake, I believe there is a trip to the local berry farm in her plans.
She needs to get the strawberry projects completed to make way for the black raspberry jam and baked goods spectacles that immediately follow.
It’s looking like it will be a berry, berry good season for us this year.
I say, “Mmmm!” to that! Better late than never.
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Relative Something 