Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
She was the UK Queen for most of our lives, making it a struggle to grasp how things are already different.
There are a vast number of images of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary appearing in memorials to her. This one is a favorite for me:
May her positive influence in the world reverberate forevermore.
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Weed Control
We had two primary goals in mind when we plotted a strategy for what we would focus our efforts on yesterday. The first was something I hoped wouldn’t take a lot of time to accomplish. There were two tipped trees with upper branches hung up in surrounding trees. Using knowledge gained by watching the tree professionals who worked for us last spring bring down similar “widow-makers,” I readied our chainsaw and headed into the woods.
With my mind focused solely on the task at hand, I failed to take any pictures of the leaning trees or the keen aftermath of my success in bringing them down. The big poplar near the road took a lot more time than I anticipated. After five successive cuts ultimately eliminating the lower trunk that had been leaning at a 45° angle, the remaining upper portion of branches stood vertical and was still tangled in the branches of surrounding trees.
I needed to go back to the shop to get our pole chainsaw to finish the job. By the time we finished cutting trees, the day was more than half over.
The second goal was to get the hay field mowed, a job that I knew would take more hours than I really wanted to give to the task.
The growth wasn’t excessively tall but there were plenty of weeds maturing and we didn’t want them going to seed. I finally finished around 7:00 p.m. after almost 5 hours out on the tractor. At one point, feeling like it was taking too long, I tried running in a higher gear to speed up progress. The bouncing and jostling were a bit too much and the high gear made backing up hard to manage. All I could do was plod along at a steady pace in the lower gear and keep making passes until the entire field was finally cut.
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Cyndie took pictures as I headed toward the gate upon finishing. For a relatively small field, it sure is bigger than it seems.
The horses were relegated to the unmowed back pasture for the day. They are doing a fair job of grazing the good grass in that pasture but there are enough unwanted weeds in that field that it will need to be mowed soon as well.
In a day or two, they will be allowed back on the grass in the hay field. Then I will spend the better part of a day mowing the back pasture.
As much as I dread doing the mowing, the fields sure look great with all the weeds knocked down. For now, in our minds, mowing is our preferred method over chemical applications for reducing weeds that are toxic to horses. It may not be as effective, but mowing doesn’t leave a weed killer residue in our soil.
I can live with giving two afternoons of my precious time to bouncing along on the diesel tractor a couple of times a summer.
It’s easier than chainsawing widow-makers!
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Season’s Bounty
As always, we arrived home yesterday with a royal greeting from our animals. After unpacking the foodstuffs that made the trip home with us and then gobbling up some of it for lunch, we granted Delilah her wish and headed outside to survey the grounds.
The first thing I noticed was how much some of the grass has grown since I last cut it. At the same time, the ground seems incredibly dry. Parched and cracked enough that I don’t understand the hearty growth of some areas of grass.
The next noteworthy thing that caught our attention was the incredible buzzing sounds of a striking number of bees busy in the yellow flowering tops of goldenrod beside one of our trails.
Cyndie did a great job of capturing a photo of a couple of the happy visitors.
Not far down that same trail, we made another surprising discovery. Tucked behind a large viburnum nannyberry bush was a volunteer apple tree with an impressive amount of fruit on its limbs. It’s the first time I noticed it, which is surprising because we usually pay a lot of attention to the volunteer trees showing up beside our trails.
We made our way out into the pastures to say hello to the horses and quickly decided they were telling us the flies were bothering them. Cyndie went back and got their fly masks. The growth in the pastures is a mixture of good grass they looked very happy to be munching and a disturbing number of problematic weeds.
I will be mowing the pastures to a pretty short height as soon as I can get to it in attempt to control some of the weed propagation.
I re-stacked the dwindling number of hay bales in the shed to make room for the next delivery, now expected to arrive on Friday. By then, Cyndie will be on her way to Boston with her mother to visit Barry and Carlos. I will be stacking bales by myself.
The last stop for Cyndie on the tour of our property was her garden. She came in with quite a bounty of a photogenic variety of vegetables.
She thinks some of the growth was stunted by how dry it has been, but the overall variety of produce sure looks impressive. Pretty good for a year when her planting was hindered by knee replacement surgery back in the spring.
We’re just happy to have any bounty at all.
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Leaving Us
It’s Tuesday after Labor Day and plenty of fall activities that haven’t already kicked off will be starting today. Our guests left us yesterday for the next leg of their journey in a vehicle that looked to be packed with everything a college freshman would need to get started.
The Birgens awoke in the morning to the news that the Kenyan Supreme Court has ruled that the candidate, William Ruto, was properly elected President in the 2022 general election. One less thing to be concerned about for them at a time their oldest son is starting a new job and the youngest is starting college.
I find myself thinking about how nice it is to be well beyond the years of taking kids to their first year of college. Feels similar to when I began to appreciate getting past the years when September meant “back to school” during the K-12 phase of our kids’ lives.
The few connotations September holds for me now are the onset of fall colors, Cyndie’s and my anniversary (41 years!), Julian’s birthday, and the start of MN Vikings football –despite my best efforts to stop caring about anything having to do with the modern-day NFL. Nothing about getting prepared for school.
I have already noticed the return of school bus traffic on our road at home twice a day, but the impact from that on my life is negligible.
I tip my hat to all of you who have school-age children starting a new bus and/or classroom experience today.
My time with access to television coverage of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament is ending today as we leave the lake place and return home.
For some reason –probably related to wanting to witness Serena Williams make one last attempt for a major victory at the end of her illustrious career– I was inspired to watch as many live matches as I could this year. I was lucky to have captured a few dramatic matchups that were really exciting and very competitive.
A couple of them were almost as exciting as the end of the Florida State vs. LSU college football game I stumbled upon Sunday night during a break in the tennis.
It’s probably a good thing we are leaving the lake place and all the cable sports channels I have access to here so I can take a break from spectator sports and get outside and give this gorgeous September weather the proper respect it deserves.
It’s my favorite time of year, right up there with my other favorite, winter!
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Last Hurrah
Taking full advantage of immersing ourselves in the last Sunday of the summer season up at the lake, we hiked, swam, boated, feasted, visited, and began putting away water toys. Hosting members of Friswold’s adopted family, the Birgens, we had added reasons to wander the grounds and socialize with fellow “Wildwooders.” Wildwoodites? Member clans of the incredible Wildwood Lodge Club (WWLC).
The holiday weekend inspired an additional reason to gather members, so Cyndie and her mom invited everyone to our place for a 5 o’clock cocktail party with socializing around the fire. With flashback memories of the way it was done when Cyndie was a kid up here, that fire was then used to cook burgers for our dinner.
In another throwback to a bygone era, I got out my little travel guitar and “strumgled” [strummed and struggled] a few songs from the cobwebs of my fading memory. It was sufficient to punctuate the culmination of a fabulous day at the lake honoring the last events of summer.
Today, the Birgens will head out on the last leg of their journey, taking their youngest, Jonathon, to his first year of college. Cyndie, her mom, and I will linger one more night and head home tomorrow.
In the wee hours before dawn this morning, our gentle slumber was serenaded by the wistful echoing calls of an owl in the woods outside our window. It truly feels like we are experiencing summer’s last hurrah.
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Behavior
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what is going on
around here
this year
that makes any sense
discernible sense
to informed people
or last year
for that matter
last six years
last hundred years
ask the planet
how it’s going
wait
don’t bother
it’s been telling us all along
but we don’t listen
or we do
but don’t respond
adequately
we muddle
brilliantly
word salads as art
successfully sprinkling love
on happy occasions
helping hands
in times of disastrous need
forgetting to follow the money
that is driving calamity
shortsightedness
wrongheaded fears
and basic human shortcomings
weaving a fabric
deleterious to the very society
societies wish to preserve
to be anti anti-something or other
becoming a fashion statement
lacking logic
seeking a forest without the trees
assuming the sun is spinning around us
because it looks like it does
day after day
hateful behavior becoming acceptable
because
why not
it’s what’s been going on
around here
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Nature’s Magnificence
It was a beautifully warm sunny afternoon that found Cyndie and me splashing in the lake to clean duck shit off the inflated floating platform in the swimming area. A thankless task because not long after we leave, the ducks return and make themselves at home again. A price we pay to co-exist with wildlife.
At the time, we had no idea stormy weather might be lurking nearby. As the dinner hour approached, pizza from Coop’s was chosen and I got elected to drive into town to pick up our order. Emerging from the trees onto the road to Hayward, a view of the open sky revealed a most spectacular display of roiling cumulonimbus clouds that were so engaging I struggled to pay appropriate attention to my driving.
While waiting at the bar to pick up our par-baked circle of deliciousness, the two tv screens overhead began to display ominous-looking warnings about a thunderstorm in Sawyer county. Based on what I had just seen in the sky, I wasn’t surprised in the least, but the folks around me who were oblivious to what it looked like outside were caught as unaware as I had been 10-minutes earlier.
It just didn’t feel like a storm-threatening kind of day.
With the pizza box safely stowed on the seat beside me, I checked the radar view on my phone before setting off and saw we were on the backside of this long line of storms that were percolating just to the southeast and moving away from us.
I called Cyndie and suggested she check out the view, knowing her deep appreciation for cloud formations. By the time she was able to see it and take pictures, the clouds had lost some of the initial splendor of the freshly blossoming thunderstorm that I was able to witness, but because we were granted a rear view of the event, it still looked impressive.
As the rotation of the earth moved the sunlight closer to our western horizon, the storm in the distance began to glow and bounce vivid color off the lake for a whole nother visual presentation.
Isn’t nature magnificent?!
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Edges Covered
With little in the way of fanfare, yesterday we raked up gravel over the last of the exposed asphalt edges of our new driveway. By that point in the exercise, I had lost much of my ability to care about the level of perfection we were achieving compared to when we first started. It’s going to be good enough for all intents and purposes.
The next phase of the driveway finishing project involves backfilling some of the steeper edges with dirt or composted manure but that detail is not as essential. It won’t worry me if we don’t get that all done prior to the arrival of the snow season.
We did make a point of celebrating the accomplishment a little later in the day with a leisurely game of CrossCrib out on our deck. A nod to the vacation-mode feeling of being up at the lake, it occurred to me we have the same game board at home and a deck that offers everything except a view of a lake. We can play at home just as well as up at Wildwood.
We tend to forget sometimes, what with all the landscape and animals vying for our time and attention. A card game in the middle of a beautiful afternoon can be a healthy diversion.
Since today is the Friday of a holiday weekend, we will be traveling north to the lake place again, leaving the dog behind to be cared for by our house and animal sitter, Grace.
This is a routine that has served us well this summer. Labor Day weekend is traditionally the last gasp of summer activities up at the lake. That doesn’t mean we will stop making the trek up there, though. A few trees were already showing signs of fall color on the drive home last weekend. That spectacle provides plenty of incentive to get back up to the lake after Labor Day.
First things first. We have a long weekend to enjoy some very promising-looking weather predicted for the northland.
It will be even nicer knowing the edges of the new asphalt driveway at home are now completely covered with a gravel shoulder.
Huzzah!
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Big Blade
We had a close-up view of a wind turbine blade outside the Eco Experience building at the Minnesota State Fair. It provided a dramatically different perspective from how these blades appear when slowly turning a great distance away.
I framed this picture to remove any visual references that reveal this blade was attached to the ground and pointing straight up into the sky. These blades are massively large.
I’ve been telling myself the image is well-suited to become a Words on Images creation but that moment hasn’t materialized yet. In the meantime, I am posting it today, as is, because I didn’t have anything else to write about.
I mowed the lawn for the last time in August yesterday. Wish I could say it would be the last time this year but predictions for September warmth hint the growing season will last well into the fall again this year. After the significant amount of rain we received last weekend, there are areas on our property where the grass is as long and lush as we’ve ever seen it.
The big blades I’ll be spinning in the weeks ahead will be all about cutting grass, not generating electricity.
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Fair Fun
Just as I suspected, getting there required the first long wait in a queue for an express bus ride to the great Minnesota State Fair. There would be more lines to come but none of them ended up becoming unbearable waits and they always came with a good reward.
Not having to drive through traffic and pay a high price to park made it well worth the approximate half-hour wait for the bus ride.
We were able to bypass the LONG line at the front gate to purchase an entrance ticket because we bought ours online in advance. The nice young ticket checker was able to tap my phone for me to navigate to the e-ticket barcodes. Saved me the embarrassment of trying to do it myself.
If I could post just one picture for our day at the fair, this next one would be my choice.
Breakfast of champions. Cyndie asked, “Is it too early for cotton candy?”
We’d been inside the gate for a mere few seconds. “No,” I answered.
What could I say? We were at the State Fair! She was going to need the sugar buzz to survive a LOT of walking in the hours ahead.
What else should we eat?
There went my sugar quota for the day. Look at how many you have to eat just to get the cover on to save the rest for eating when you get home.
Biggest highlight of the day for me was chatting up the DNR folks for information and ideas about caring for our fields and forest. We have a lot of ash trees in our woods and they most likely won’t survive another decade based on the odds of emerald ash borer infestation. As a result of the warming climate, we should consider replacing them as they die with trees that have historically done well in the growing zone just south of our location.
Moose picture. Just, well… because, moose! And a really big one, too.
Speaking of art, fine art at the Fair is always fun.
It occurred to me that some visitors from rural farm country might be experiencing museum quality art displays for the first time in their lives. It’s a gas seeing the mix of humans from every walk of life mingling in the wide range of “neighborhoods” at the Fair. From the Fine Arts building to the hog barn feels like a world away.
Some streets were wide open and food vendors there required little in the way of wait times. A few blocks later, it was an elbow to elbow mass of people trying to walk in multiple directions. We bought deep fried cheese curds from a booth on a less-crowded block. The greasy goodness was just as satisfying as if we’d gotten them from the busiest corner of them all.
We never did find the 4-H kid who was showing a cow that spent much of the summer on the field next door to us, but we did get to see some kids who really love their livestock. The young man in the photo above was taking a little rest with his prized porker.
There was this large array of feathered coyote food in cages. Since that was my first thought, it is my opinion that I’m not ready yet to go back to having those sweet birds roaming our land again.
I forgot to take a picture of the incredible pork schnitzel sandwich that was probably the best thing I ate all day, but a chocolate malt from the Dairy Building was photographed in the nick of time before the cup got emptied.
Of all the days we picked to attend, Tuesday is not a good day to see horses.
The horse barn was closed all day. Really?
It took until we were about to leave before I finally came upon a person I knew. Friend, Mary Jo, from the Tour of Minnesota bike trips, was helping one of her friends who had space on the second level of the Grandstand selling things from a store she has near Rice Lake, WI (I think it was). Another highlight of the day.
We had a fabulous time at the Fair. Now, all we have to do is figure out how to stop eating everything in sight and get back to normal.
Whatever normal is.
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