Adding Siding
Record warmth yesterday, and we spent almost all of it chipping away at the somewhat tedious task of siding the chicken coop with salvaged lumber. It feels a little like I’ve made this project more complicated than it deserves, but I justify it in my mind as a good exercise in teaching myself carpentry skills.
I’ve never tried to make cabinets and had no clue about mounting a hinged door. We started small and did the narrow opening for accessing the poop board. It turned out a little too tight, but filing edges has been enough to make it work.
Next, we hung the three-hinge people door. I’m still unsure of the essential details that need to be considered, but somehow I seem to have faked my way through it and ended up with a door the appears to work perfectly.
Working in the hot sun was almost too uncomfortable, but since it is November, it seemed a little inconsiderate to frame that hardship as a complaint.
The warming of our planet does come with some short-term perks in the interim before whatever large-scale calamity will eventually doom civilization as we know it.
Using the boards we salvaged from pallets, we are now slowly but surely working our way up the walls with a piecemeal patchwork of siding. It is creative fun for a while, and then gets a little too tricky around openings and edges that require excessive amounts of measuring and cutting to fit.
Whose idea was it to make this thing so complicated, anyway?
Good things come to those who wait, and with that, I expect to be happy with this mansion of a chicken coop when it is finally completed.
More importantly, it is my hope that some chickens will be very, very happy with it, too.
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Beneath Trees
After a bit of a pause in construction, I was stepping out to work on the chicken coop again yesterday, now that Cyndie is home to lend a helping hand. We were taking advantage of the very summer-like weather gracing our region this first week of November.
Striding across the yard I was suddenly struck by how distinctly different the carpet of leaves was within just a few steps. Photo op!
Beneath a big old oak tree that holds most of its dried leaves through the winter.
Next tree over is a dominant poplar that lost a significant portion of its top in a storm during the summer.
On the other side of the driveway, the grove of maples create a thick layer of light crunchy playfulness that is a delight to walk through.
Another example of the micro-environments that collectively make up the paradise where we live. We call it Wintervale Ranch.
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Boulders Rocking
While we were standing around the center of labyrinth Wednesday night, I glanced at the big boulders and immediately sensed something seemed different. One of them seems to be settling into an increased lean away from the other. It comes as no surprise, since the soil is so incredibly saturated around here. 
It has me wondering what it will be like this winter when the ground freezes. Will the excess water in the surface soil create more in the way of heaving? Could those boulders get pushed over on their sides?
Maybe when the tree finally gets established, we can get rid of the boulders altogether and let the maple take their place.
What do I mean by we ? By the time that happens, I probably won’t be around anymore and those decisions will likely be someone else’s to make.
For this moment, I am going to work on tending to the boulders to the best of my ability, while also finding a way to adjust my attitude so that I will accept the unexpected results that nature serves up.
I’m sure hoping that nature will serve up a healthy and vibrant transplanted tree. If that happens, I will find it much less concerning if/when the boulders shift into a new and different orientation from the one with which we started.
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Trying Again
Despite a strong inclination I have had to just shut up about the tree transplanting —at least until we finally meet with success in this one particular spot— I can’t stop myself from reporting the story. We have waited for most of the summer to pull out the previous dead tree from the center of the labyrinth, even though it was long ago obvious it hadn’t survived.
There was no hurry, because our plan for the next attempt was to wait until the trees drop their leaves before trying again.
The trees have dropped their leaves.
Earlier in the summer, when we knew we would need to try again, I searched through the saplings beneath the magnificent maple tree that has been my inspiration all along. I like envisioning what one of the offspring of that beauty will look like in the middle of the labyrinth garden when it reaches the same maturity of years.
I selected and marked a tree that I liked. Then we waited.
Yesterday was the day we picked to execute our fourth try at transplanting one of our maple trees to the center of the labyrinth. Cyndie dug out the hole in preparation and when I got home from work, we set about the challenging task of extricating our selection from the spot where it originated.
It didn’t want to come out easily.
With daylight fading, we finally wrested our new hope from the earth’s grasp. Using a wheelbarrow, we transported the tree to the labyrinth and slid it into the hole.
With all the tender loving care we could muster, we prepared the new home for this tree. Now we wait. Nature needs to do the rest.
And if it doesn’t take, I’m just going to keep trying, all the while debating whether I will do so covertly, or choose to continue chronicling the possible repetition of failures.
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Goal Achieved
I was wearing a short-sleeve tee-shirt and mowing grass in the warm afternoon sunshine on November 1st. Whaaaaat?
It’s for real. Of course, I also then went inside and watched some baseball on television afterward. It’s like a summer with no end. Something tells me it might make winter’s inevitable arrival come on with an abrupt switch when it finally hits.
So, my main motivation to get out on the lawn tractor was to test out my latest landscaping efforts and see how navigable the path around the southern fence lines is.
It worked! Not flawlessly, but it did work. I have wanted to accomplish this goal for a long time, so this was very satisfying.
There are two spots in particular where I needed to get off the tractor to lift it over a too-steep hazard where there are runoff trenches across the path. If I want to be able to drive across these, I’m going to need to modify them to create much more gradual sloping edges.
That can be done, but it’s not imperative that it happen right away. I’m kinda hoping our grass will stop growing and the snow season will arrive soon enough that I won’t need to be driving around there again until next spring.
After I completed a return trip along that fence line, I turned the corner and was headed toward the labyrinth garden. There, I discovered two deer casually grazing the variety of growing treats within. They looked up at me with mild curiosity, surveying my approach. It surprised me a bit that they didn’t act alarmed or run off.
So I just kept rolling toward them, pulling out my phone to see if I could capture them in a picture to share with Cyndie.
They’re there, but the natural concealment of their coloring is very noticeable, because they are mostly not!
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Some Days
Yesterday at work I found myself a little short of feeling like my best. Was it simply a result of it being a Monday? Possibly. More likely, it had something to do with a sub-par night’s sleep. I couldn’t get myself to turn off the Cubbies Sunday night as they eked out a victory in game 5 of the World Series. That kept me up past my bedtime.
In addition, my days of having the whole bed to myself came to an end when Cyndie arrived home from visiting the Morales family in Guatemala in the wee hours of oh-dark-thirty. That’s about the worst time of night to have a sleep cycle interrupted.
As I sat at my desk trying to shake out the cobwebs, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I should have just stayed home for the day. It wasn’t anything physical. I felt fine, I just didn’t feel all that… fine.
Then an issue needed to be addressed, and another, and another. Good thing I didn’t stay home. I may not have been my best, but I was present and available to at least contribute in the moment. Some days we need to allow ourselves to accept this as good enough. Half-speed is better than no speed at all when there is work to be done.
So, Cyndie got home in the middle of the night and I left for work in the dark of morning. She was back, but I hadn’t seen her yet, so I was getting excited to get home. I had no idea I would find this:
She had a fire in the fireplace and the kitchen filled with the aroma of fresh-baked cookies, there were scones she’d baked for breakfast, and that bread was rising on the stove. Oh, and it was nice to be able to see her, too.
As it was, a day that started out less than fine, turned out pretty darn good in the end.
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October Flowers
It’s All Hallow’s Eve and we have still got some flowers blooming. Who’da thunk it?
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Today is the 25th anniversary of a blizzard that hit the Twin Cities in 1991. One of my memories of that event is of our next-door neighbor trying to navigate his car through the mess of deep snow and ice on the road and his not being able to get into his uncleared driveway. There was still a MN Twins flag attached to his car, a remnant of the 2nd World Series championship the team had just accomplished days before.
It seemed so surreal to me. Baseball. Halloween. Blizzard. It was rather odd.
It was actually morning of the next day and I was standing in our driveway, almost finished with shoveling the 2-feet of snow we had received. We mutually agreed he should park his car in our driveway until he got his cleared.
That storm now serves as a benchmark for me to always be aware that winter could arrive all at once, in one big storm that changes from a warm fall afternoon to snow that lasts a season, all in a matter of a few days. And it could happen in October.
Which is similar to the benchmark I now use for spring snowstorms. The first year we lived here, in May of 2013, we received 18 inches of snow. Who’da thunk it?
It could happen.
But it doesn’t look like we will have any worries of snow in October this year. More likely, we’ll have November flowers.
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Shaping Terrain
Despite the sprinkling rain that pestered most of the day yesterday, I decided to try moving some dirt and turf from the drainage ditch along our southern property line to the adjacent sloped path.
When the new fence was installed and the drainage ditch improved, there wasn’t much width remaining beside a little bend in the fence. It was an impediment to being able to use the tractor to mow that section of path around the outside of the hay-field fence.
Originally, I envisioned using the loader on the tractor to dig out the sediment that has been accumulating in the ditch, but it hasn’t been dry enough to do that for months.
Since I was already working along that fence line this weekend, I decided to see what I could accomplish using a shovel to dig it out by hand. It was a little messy, and a bit tedious, but it was probably a better method for then using the material removed to improve the path.
Using blocks of dirt and turf that I could barely lift with the shovel, I built up the low side until it was wide enough to fit at least the lawn tractor, for now. Might be dicey fitting the diesel around that bend.
The strip around the fence only received infrequent attention and would grow tall and thick, so I had been mowing navigable portions with the brush cutter. Now that I will be able to drive the lawn tractor around, it will be convenient enough that I can keep it cut short all the time.
Well, as short at the rest of the lawn, which all grows so fast that short is a relative term.
With that little narrow bend of path fixed, there was only one other barrier remaining to allow driving the full circumference of our horse-fenced fields. Back in the corner by the woods there is an old ravine that was created by years of water runoff. Previous owners had dumped a lot of old broken up concrete in it to slow the erosion.
We have created a better defined intentional swale a short distance above that directing the bulk of energized flow into the main drainage ditch. It crossed my mind to fill in the ravine, but some water still wants to follow the ease of that natural route and I’d rather not fight it.
Simple solution: a bridge. For now, nothing fancy. I used a few left over fence posts and then broke down and actually purchased additional lumber to make it wide enough to drive across.
I placed them across the washout yesterday in the rain, leaving the task of cutting a notch in the dirt on each side to level them for today.
Then I will be driving to the airport to pick up George and Anneliese. I’ve come to the end of my solo weekend on the ranch. They are going to return the favor of airport transport after midnight tonight when Cyndie arrives home from Guatemala, so I can get some sleep before the start of my work week.
I’m looking forward to having everyone home again.
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Straightening Posts
With my trusty companion, Delilah, tagging along, I lugged tools across the pasture to finally deal with a corner post that had been bugging me for months because of its ever-increasing lean.
Starting with chains and a come-along, I quickly discovered that the angle I was dealing with was compound.
I would need to pull from both directions. There was a problem with that, though. There wasn’t anything to pull against in the second direction.
While Delilah and I surveyed the situation, the neighbors suddenly showed great interest in our presence.
The cows came running up to the fence around their pasture and stared at us expectantly. I think maybe that leaning post was bugging them, too.
Since I couldn’t pull in that second direction, I decided to push. I got the tractor.
It worked pretty slick, although it required a lot of climbing on and off to check the progress. Delilah wasn’t offering any assistance at that point, and I couldn’t see if it was straight from the tractor seat.
Once I had it where I wanted it, there was a long process of trying to pack the soil around the posts to a point that would hold them in place after I released the supporting pressure. In fact, just to be sure, I left the come-along and chains in place overnight, even though I had put the tractor back in the garage.
A little insurance while the soil dries out and settles for the long haul, which I hope lasts for a very long time. Of course, that part about dry soil won’t last long at all. It is supposed to rain again this afternoon and tonight.
I wonder if I packed the soil firmly enough.
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Revisiting Drops
From the Relative Something archives, last night I randomly popped in on March of 2010, from which I have selected a poem for reposting today. With no particular reason in mind, I (re)-present: Dew Drops.
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early today
when it’s hard to decide
whether to stay in bed
or get up instead
and go outside
there is a part of me
that already knows
plan as I might
all the time just goes
somewhere far
away from here
and that one chance I had
up and disappears
like a wispy wet cloud
of dew drops and tears
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.It is possible that my unconscious mind is contemplating the fact that I have a weekend brimming with potential ahead of me, and a simmering trepidation that I might let it slip away without accomplishing much in the way of rewarding results. Or maybe it’s just that I am too tired to think through writing something fresh and new.
I drove George and Anneliese to the airport very early in the morning yesterday, at the expense of a long night’s sleep. Now I’m on my own for the weekend, which could mean I won’t have any distractions and will get a lot done, or it could lead to a loss of motivation that spawns an excessive amount of sloth-ness breaking out.
I feel as though I wouldn’t have any difficulty in framing a few prolonged bouts of sleeping as a much-needed and highly valuable thing to do.
Even as all the time goes and chances to do things up and disappear.
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