Conflicting Thoughts
There’s a battle raging in the available space of my brain between the wonderful goodness all around us and the repeated failings of improvement where the needs are well known. We just heard an update on progress to vaccinate for COVID-19 that lamented the low percentage of the neediest people receiving shots, despite the advanced knowledge that this should be the priority. Even when there is broad public awareness of the need to get the first vaccinations to the communities most impacted by the virus, insufficient effort to make this come about leaves things to play out as usual with the advantage going to people of privilege.
It is a lot easier to talk about what “should” happen than it is to actually enact the changes needed to achieve high ideals.
Sounds a little like the way things always go in our governmental system. Two-party politics for passing legislation advancing the lofty goals of a nation results in a lot of sounding off but very little in the way of bringing lasting positive change. Progress is slow for the poor and disenfranchised citizens of our country.
We have passed the 1-year milestone since the pandemic took over all of our lives and Cyndie and I have thus far dodged illness. Others we know have not been so lucky, including some who are currently suffering symptoms. We are sending love to those of you experiencing the virus first-hand.
News reports announcing crazy-high numbers of small earthquakes in Iceland, combined with several other notable recent quakes around the planet suggest something big is about to go boom. It’s a strange threat to contemplate from our relatively stable geographic landscape.
A strong spring melt is underway at Wintervale and the chickens are thrilled over the ever-expanding “tillable” terrain becoming exposed again.
The south-facing slopes are free of snow but the rest of the forest is still covered like the surfaces of an old-fashioned freezer. Walking the trails is a fascinating demonstration of how much chill emanates from the icy carpet below.
Delilah loves to pause and rub her face in the snow-cone texture. Her head was all wet at the end of a walk yesterday from rolling in the slushy snow.
It’s incredibly calm and soothingly optimistic with the promise of spring unfurling right before our eyes. The animals all seem giddy and I guess that is contagious.
It’s a welcome contrast to the more unsettling thoughts looming.
Here’s to visions of the days ahead when COVID sufferers can come walk our trails, breathe the health of our forest air, and hang out with our chickens for a while.
We’ll send you home with fresh free-range eggs.
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Stopping Early
We are going to throw in the towel on the latest jigsaw puzzle. All the remaining pieces are solid black and the exercise of finding the exact one that will fit lacks a key feature I truly enjoy in locating pieces: COLOR!
Last week I came close to making the same decision but then changed my mind and took another crack at progress. Finding pieces is certainly possible but requires such intense focus and more patience due to long droughts between success than I want to muster. I’m more inclined toward random brief visits when the energy is right (like when Cyndie is baking in the kitchen). Quick results are so much more rewarding for those short sessions.
Puzzling is supposed to be fun, after all.
Plus, we splurged on a bunch of puzzles all at once and have two left that we are chomping to start. In the queue are a beautiful wolf and another with more horses. The way the weather is warming and the hours of sunlight are increasing, our days of puzzling are soon going to be replaced by outdoor pursuits.
This is no time to be languishing on hundreds of similar pieces of all the same color. I can torture myself with that next winter.
We’re stopping early on finishing the expansive black void of outer space.
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Trotting Turkeys
Wild turkeys are no longer as rare a sight as when I was growing up, but it is still a special treat to have them actually pay a visit up close. Yesterday, we suddenly spotted a batch of them up near the house, out on the driveway. As I stepped toward the window, they noticed my presence and started movement off the driveway. They looked like they would be headed toward the chicken coop and I wondered how that would play out.
Still in my house slippers, I stepped outside as slyly as possible, hoping to avoid scaring them away. It was clear they were aware of me and I wasn’t able to record more than a few seconds of their visit before they disappeared into the woods, taking a path that crossed midway between the house and the chicken coop.
If you click on the image, you can spot movement by some chickens in the distance, to the left of the coop.
From my vantage point, it looked like chickens and turkeys were oblivious to one another. One of the turkeys seemed to be providing a cluck, …cluck cadence as they traversed the nearby trees into the main woods. It was decidedly different from the variety of sounds our chickens make, but with a hint of familiarity, too.
I made sure Cyndie counted only 14 birds in the coop when she closed it up for the night, in case one of those wild turkeys decided to take a crack at domestic life.
There was nobody roosting inside but them chickens.
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New Heart
It’s difficult to do a sculpture justice with a couple of two-dimensional images, but taking pictures of my projects allows me to keep a record of pieces that won’t stay in my possession forever. With that, I took these photos yesterday to chronicle the finished product of my latest woodworking endeavor.
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As I am wont to do, I’ve left the backside natural bark and shaped and polished the front into a heart shape from a piece of ash where the tree forked into two branches.
Completing this latest heart has inspired me to start over right away with another wood sculpting project from the variety of wood chunks I’ve stockpiled in the shop, salvaged from trees we’ve cut down over the years. I have a rough idea of what I feel like making next, but that vision will merge with the features of the wood I select to ultimately determine what emerges in the end.
Most often, when I put my heart into it, that is the shape that results.
I’m completely okay with that.
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Can’t Decide
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Help me out. I can’t decide. Which image would you pick for use on a blog post? I like them both..
Number 1
Number 2
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I like the shadows on the snow and the faint indentation of the stick from a previous position.
There are other details that I will refrain from pointing out so as to allow your eyes to pick what catches your attention.
Honestly, my preference would be to only show one image and not give viewers the opportunity to notice another version that they might like better.
Feel free to imagine your preference printed in high resolution, matted and framed in a perfectly complimentary minimalist frame and hanging on a wall in your favorite gallery.
Of course, I don’t really need to know which one to use in a blog post, because I already have.
I was just looking for an excuse to use them both because, despite my preference to not, I just couldn’t get myself to decide.
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Knowing Limitations
As if a physical experiment was even necessary, I tested the difference of splitting our stringy ash logs with my kindling splitter on a warm day yesterday and successfully demonstrated the obvious limitations of the otherwise wonderful tool.
In extreme cold, the logs pop apart with much less shredding of the fibers. The temperature was in the 40s (F) and the limitations of that 20-pound weight to force the wedge through the tangle of grains were plain to see. Even at the advertised force of 14-tons. That’s verticle force, I’m sure, not horizontal.
That Smart Splitter® works amazingly well within its obvious limitations. I’ve successfully accomplished manually splitting the wide variety of the types of wood on our property, especially if the logs are cut reasonably short. I just need to remember to save the complex grain woods for the coldest of winter days.
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Time Weathered
What a wind we experienced yesterday! A simple walk around the property was an exhausting struggle. The bare branches of our trees clattered overhead as they bounced against one another, putting me on alert about walking beneath them. Delilah’s ability to smell what’d been going on overnight was visibly altered as a wealth of distant scent information was arriving through the air faster than she could parse and the ground scents were being endlessly scrubbed away.
While deep in the woods near the edge of our property, we witnessed the sound of a large tree cracking and falling. My first impression had me turning to my left to look up the hill toward the direction of our house, but that didn’t sound right. Looking in the opposite direction into our neighbor’s woods locked into the full sound, but I couldn’t see the source.
It was definitely impacting multiple trees and the cracking and crunching made quite an impression. I looked toward Delilah and she was staring intently toward the direction of the sound, after which she looked up at me as if to say, “Whoa!” –as in, ‘that was huge!’
Yeah, that was a “whoa” alright. It was a big one that answered any questions about falling trees making sounds whether anyone was there, or not.
We were out on the second trek of the day and I could see the footprint evidence of Cyndie and Delilah’s first walk at dawn. Cyndie was able to stay on top of the frozen crust. It provided a contrast to the other extreme from her afternoon walk the day before when the soft snow had her boots dropping to the full depth, making a stroll on our trail into a real slog.
At the hour I was traveling over the terrain, my boots were just breaking the surface.
Our snowpack has experienced multiple thaw/freeze cycles in the last week and then yesterday the surface was scoured by the relentless battering of gale-force gusting winds. It barely looks like snow anymore. It resembles the surface of the moon, except for the occasional random foot path trails various wildlife visitors have left in their wake.
This morning’s peaceful calm almost enhances the perception of a lunar location.
It’s a calm before the next storm, we are told. A Winter Weather Advisory is on for tonight and tomorrow morning in our location. That crusty surface will be given a fresh new coat of inches on which we get to tread in the days ahead.
Huzzah to that, we say! Bring it on.
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Not Rare
Whatever the data source was that Cyndie happened upon which touted the rate of occasions of double-yolk eggs as being about one time in a thousand, I think it was based on a “universal” average. Something along the lines of randomly buying a thousand eggs from which you might get one double yolk.
It doesn’t likely apply to a situation like ours where a specific thirteen laying hens are producing eggs that are collected every day.
Either the double yolk is contagious or one of our hens is regularly releasing two yolks in quick succession that are getting covered by one shell. Cyndie says we’ve had at least ten, maybe a dozen doubles, since more of the young ones have begun to mature to the age of laying in the last few weeks.
We are up to around 7 to 8 eggs per day. We are finding the little –and not so little– treasures in all four of the nest boxes, with the first box closest to their access door the clear favorite. There is also one scofflaw who prefers making her own nest in the straw Cyndie added under the poop board to increase insulation during that bitter cold snap.
The straw will go away when the day for a full spring cleaning arrives and the floor of the coop will return to being covered with sand only. We’ll see if the oddball continues to ignore the nest boxes and chooses sand over wood shavings.
If we were selling our eggs, we could charge a premium for a dozen of the double-extra-large eggs, except we don’t have any cartons that would hold them.
When the hens exceed our rate of consumption and Cyndie’s baking extravaganzas, surplus dozens get distributed to family and a few lucky friends. Get ready, kids! There are fresh eggs in your near future!
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Unknown Connections
There is so much music that I feel connected to, a lifetime’s worth, really. More to the point, the songwriters and performing artists. They have shared their creative visions and I have absorbed their renditions, on repeating rotations for years and often decades. Some of the people whose work has resonated for me draw me to want to know more about them.
I am an unabashed fan.
Their music is the most listened to in my library. They become connected to me in the unique way of celebrity, in that they have no idea who I am, but to me, it is as if we have become friends.
Upon fantasizing about how things would go if we suddenly found ourselves hanging out together with no agenda or time constraints, I wonder, would the artists of my liking honestly show any sense of connection with me?
My cat seems to like me in a way that hints at a connection. She also will just as quickly demonstrate total disdain. I guess, in reality, that combination of feelings is mutual.
That creative artist who penned lyrics that trip my trigger of perspectives, curiosities, emotions, longings, or visions of the world probably also chews food with their mouth open or has some other odd characteristic that would sour my attraction.
I could get all stalker-like and make my fanaticism known to them to find out for sure, but it makes much more sense to me that I leave the connection unknown, other than my anonymous contribution to their financial success by buying what they are selling and listening to the product of their genius.
The secret to connecting with an artist, in my opinion, is by not knowing anything about them when you meet. If a connection clicks, it isn’t a result of the preconceived perception one would have in mind. I have been curious to know how celebrities feel about meeting people who have no idea about their fame.
I would guess for really famous people, it would be refreshing.
In this scenario, I hope I wouldn’t end up dissing the person like the way my cat disses me.
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Relative Something 