Bright Morning
The water line in the Ritchie fountain needed a brief shot of hot water to flow this morning, but that will probably be the end of our water worries for a few days. The temperature is climbing swiftly this morning, and we will be heading out to pull off horse blankets as soon as I finish this post. It is easy to see travel patterns now that we’ve had plenty of days without new snow.
Here is the difference between one time down a trail and a frequently used path:
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I’ve pointed out many times the icy patches in the large paddock that the horses avoid. Here is Mia soaking up the morning sun where you can see the horses cover a lot of the ground except for where they don’t:
That manure pile is my attempt to build a mound over the drain tile from the barn water spigot to keep them from squishing it. The water that drains from it creates that icy patch that the horses know to avoid.
This morning, I caught a shot of Mix’s grain mustache when she looked up from cleaning the spillage on Swing’s placemat.
It’s a pretty cheery day here in our oblivion, sequestered from any gloom or doom related to the evils of this world. It makes me feel a little guilty about how nice we have it. I don’t feel any guilt at all about making the horses’ world as blissful as possible for them.
For now, we are taking care of each other.
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Warming Up
We added a few more degrees for our daytime high temperature yesterday, and it is beginning to feel pleasant for an afternoon stroll. Before Asher and I stepped out for a sunny explore, I was looking in on the horses via the camera and finally spotted Light lying down for a deeper rest.
As soon as she laid down, Mia decided to join her. They didn’t stay down for long, but every little deep nap is beneficial.
All that high sunshine made quick work of cleaning up the pavement of our driveway.
Sunday is forecast to be the first of three days with temperatures above freezing, so I expect we will see more than just the pavement emerge from the meager blanket of snow cover that has accumulated so far this year.
Enough days have passed since the last snowfall that the traffic pattern of the horses is easier than ever to discern. It is also easy to see where wildlife is traveling on our land. These tracks move across our fence line like it isn’t even there.
I once watched a deer pass between the wires of our fence without slowing down, and it didn’t even cause the lines to vibrate. Even though I witnessed it happen, I don’t see how it is possible. I don’t recall whether we had the fence energized at the time or not, but if they don’t touch the wire, that’s not going to make a difference anyway.
I sure am glad I’m not trying to make a living off of winter snow activities. It’s going to feel like shirt-sleeve weather in a couple of days.
We are looking forward to not worrying about the waterer in the paddocks freezing up for a while. I will also appreciate the wetted grain not freezing to the bottom and sides of the feed buckets.
It’s going to feel like spring is coming, but I do not want to entertain false hope. The month of March has a reputation around here of frequently being the snowiest month. I will remain cautiously optimistic, yet I may also pump air into my bicycle tires just in case the riding season gets off to an early start.
Anything that puts -30°F wind-chill temperatures out of mind will be warmly welcomed. (See what I did there?)
[in Beavis or Butt Head voice] Heh heh. He said, “warmly.”
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Good Housekeeping
What day does your cleaning crew show up to clean around the barn? Ours arrived yesterday (in the form of me) and did a fantastic job sprucing up the horses’ living quarters. Even though the air temperature was only in the single digits (F) in the afternoon, it was twenty degrees warmer than when we showed up to feed the horses in the morning. The difference was enough to allow me to work comfortably without feeling like all of our survival was on the line.
I hunted down an ice scraper that worked wonders to knock the frozen pigeon poop off of the placemats. Before Cyndie arrived to serve the buckets of grain, I raked up all the scraps of hay that tend to collect in the corners and along the walls.
The horses are always wonderfully accommodating when I am moving amongst them to do my housekeeping tasks before we bring out their food. During the periods of extreme cold, I have also taken to showing up at their buckets when they get close to being finished to break up the portions that have frozen to the bottom, corners, and edges. They all seem to recognize the reason I am there, and they allow me to mess with the food in the few seconds when they lift their heads between bites.
All of my actions are intended to make their surroundings as nice as possible for them. They have all been through hard times, and we want the place we are providing to be the absolute opposite of whatever stresses they have previously experienced. They are living their retirement in a place that we hope in time will erase any residual tension they might still carry from the rough periods of their previous lives.
I don’t mean that to sound entirely altruistic because there is a selfish component to all this housekeeping as well. I prefer the way the place looks when it is clean. Even if they didn’t appreciate their accommodations being well-tended, I’d probably continue to tidy things up just for my sake.
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Coping Well
When it gets extremely cold with dangerously low wind chill temperatures, schools cancel classes and communities postpone events, but nobody cancels walking the dog or feeding the horses. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit doesn’t keep us from donning our “space suits” to trudge out into the harsh conditions and carrying out our duties the same as every other day.
Asher needs to get out there to freshly mark his territory, and the horses need us to make sure they can get a drink of water and feed them grain and hay. Finding the water isn’t frozen in the morning is a huge plus in having things go smoothly for the early feeding. All four horses appear to be coping well with the biting cold, which also goes a long way toward allowing us to enjoy life here in the Arctic conditions.
While I was standing idle in the morning sunlight, waiting for the horses to finish their grains, I noticed some pigeons were on the waterer. They weren’t satisfied with simply getting a drink. One of them jumped in the water like it was its personal hot tub.
I have no idea how they avoid getting frozen when they step back out into the -18°F air. I would expect them to become pigeoncicles. They have been leaving a lot of pigeon-poopcicles on the horses’ placemats lately that are almost impossible to scrape off. I would say the pigeons seem to be coping with the cold better than all the rest of us.
We are starting to count the days until we can pull blankets off the horses to free them from that annoyance. As soon as overnight temps quit dropping below zero and daytime temps are hitting the 20sF, we will offer the horses some relief. The blankets are helpful during cold snaps or heavy snowfalls, but the horses would prefer not having them matting down the hair on their backs for days on end.
They have done a good job of coping with the necessary evil this week. I’d think they would appreciate having the blankets fluffed and recentered on their backs, but they tend to act non-cooperatively most of the times we try.
We just need to cope with getting a little push-back and reposition the blankets anyway. Having the blankets hanging off-center may not bug them, but it bugs the OCD tendencies in me when I see it.
That’s an area where my coping skills could use a little work.
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Deep Freeze
The temperature never rose above negative numbers yesterday, but all our electrically heated water sources for the horses functioned flawlessly! That makes tending to the animals so much less stressful, even though doing anything outside for an extended amount of time at 15 below carries its own challenges.
Yesterday afternoon, while I was waiting for the horses to finish the grain in their buckets, I was looking out over the frozen, sunlit scenery and marveled over the environment. In our homes, we have little freezers for food preservation. They take a lot of energy to function, and we try not to hold the doors open very long to preserve the cold. Restaurants have freezers so big you can walk inside them. A large frozen space seems like such an engineering accomplishment.
Yet, here I was, standing where everything I was looking at was frozen colder than any refrigerator freezer. The wood and screws of our fences. The trunks of all the trees, some of which develop long vertical cracks from the extremely dry, cold air. The ground freezes several feet deep. The world around me was one colossal freezer.
Five months from now, these temperatures will be a distant memory. It’s such a fascinating transformation.
Indoors, our bird of paradise plant is showing a new sprout on the stem of the smallest leaf. It’s a wonderful compliment to the deep freeze outside.
The previous three sprouts that have appeared since this gorgeous potted “tree” arrived at our home were so inspiring that I find myself watching and wondering where and when another pointy tip will emerge. I now have my answer.
Another leaf is imminent.
Maybe the spring thaw won’t be very far behind.
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Conflicting Evidence
One of the more frustrating situations in troubleshooting is the intermittent problem. Yesterday morning, we heated water and filled an insulated pitcher before heading to the barn to feed the horses. Since the waterer in the paddock had frozen up again the previous afternoon when the temperature was relatively mild, we were prepared for the worst after an overnight of extreme cold.
That wasn’t the case. Water was flowing just fine when we arrived to check. It doesn’t make sense to me.
If the water line is not freezing when it gets really cold overnight, the heat tape must be doing its job. That leaves me with the question of why the heat tape wouldn’t prevent freezing when the air temperature moderates into the teens (F) in the middle of the day.
At one point when we suspected the heat tape might be failing, I surmised the possibility that when the horses consistently drink from the waterer, there is enough flow through the line and the valve that it helps prevent freezing. If the waterer is untouched for a length of time, the static state of water in the lines could lead to freezing.
It’s hard to know if the horses are neglecting to drink from the waterer at regular intervals.
We have found the pans of the waterer empty when the line freezes up, so we know the horses eventually get around to drinking after the line is frozen and can’t refill.
With luck, the extreme cold snap we are experiencing for a few days now will be the last of the season. The forecast for a week from now indicates some days above freezing. At almost two months past the winter solstice, the increasing angle of sunshine in the middle of the days is noticeable. Even when the temperature stays below freezing, there are obvious signs of snowmelt around the grounds.
I’m looking forward to the return of warm days when we won’t have to worry about the waterer. If it gets warm enough that the freezing water line is no longer a problem, it will also mean I don’t have to bundle up in my space suit to go outside every morning.
Double bonus!
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Hays Gang
We got the gang back together again yesterday for a little face-to-face catching up. The five surviving Hays siblings are successful in gathering all in one place every 18 months or so, and we try to capture photographic evidence that it truly happened. This time, we met at Elliott’s house in Richfield, which is mostly central to our distribution of homes to the north, south, and east of there.
It’s mind-boggling to fathom how much life experience has occurred since the time when we would have all lived under the same roof. It would have been in the farmhouse at Intervale Ranch on the border of Eden Prairie and Edina.
At a gathering we achieved in January of 2020, one of our group shots included what has become a meme where Elliott turns his back to the camera. Somewhere, I know there is a shot where he did that at the house Cyndie and I owned in Eden Prairie, but Cyndie’s quick search found this one from 2020:
Here is how we looked yesterday…
It makes us laugh every time.
I LOVE my siblings!
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Never Simple
We hadn’t had a problem with the horse waterer in the paddocks freezing up on us again for enough days in a row that I stopped thinking about it. I still regularly glance toward it to see if there is liquid water in the pans, but I haven’t been lifting the cover to press the float and verify water flows. Temperatures were in the teens yesterday, but there was no direct sunshine.
During the afternoon feeding, I found the pans dry and immediately set about trying to warm the lines with my hands while Cyndie hustled back to the house to heat a kettle of water to pour over the tubing. It has worked simply enough to solve the problem each time it occurred the last times we’ve dealt with this. Of course, since it stopped happening, I didn’t pursue buying a new heat tape for that line. D’oh!
Since we weren’t prepared to be doing this, and our latest snowstorm was just getting underway, afternoon chores were suddenly getting complicated. While I was waiting at the waterer for Cyndie to return, Mia came down from her feed bucket looking to get a drink. It’s an awful feeling to disappoint a horse that just wants a drink of water.
When Cyndie popped out of the barn with the thermos, she was also bringing some water in a scoop she planned to use to clean the waterer. Mia stuck her snout in the scoop and guzzled what she could get out of it. I took the thermos, and Cyndie went in to fill another bucket with water for Mia. It didn’t take long at all for me to get the waterer flowing again.
If the horses keep drinking from it, the line is less likely to freeze at these relatively moderate temperatures simply because of the flowing water that refills it. If there is no flow, freezing occurs. We’ll be bringing hot water with us at the morning feeding.
Then I’ll start clearing snow. Just two days ago, I scraped the nuisance trace of snow off the pavement up by the house.
It’s all buried again now.
One more thing that’s not simple is the trick of prey surviving the threats of predators. We suspect that friendly pigeon we started calling “Plucky” may have fallen victim to a prowling cat or fox. There wasn’t a lot of evidence left, but the wing feathers were a dark color.
The predator got a meal for another day.
Life goes on. Cyndie and I are headed to a somewhat rare gathering of my Hays siblings today for an afternoon of catching up on each others’ stories. It’s my chance to tell them all the things I don’t write in this space.
Later tonight, I hope to take in a little sports spectating in the form of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament game between the USA and Canada. Hockey rivalry much? I have a feeling this one won’t simply be just any old tournament hockey game, given the current state of government affairs.
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Gross Bug
Cyndie spotted a giant dead bug on the floor that looked so gross she went to get some paper towel to pick it up, wondering what the heck it was and where it had come from in the middle of winter.
Upon closer inspection, it was a shard of Velcro that Asher had chewed to bits. Since Asher likes to focus his toothy destruction on the Velcro of his Tearribles toys, we decided Cyndie could try sewing up a toy that is basically just Velcro seams for him to gnaw on. She has yet to test it on him.
I figure we will be seeing plenty more of these kinds of gross bugs lying around once Asher gets a chance to chew on this latest homemade dog toy experiment.
Maybe we will give it to him next week in celebration of his 3rd birthday.
Speaking of birthdays, yesterday was Mia’s actual birthday. I think I’ve written before that Thoroughbreds all have their ages incremented on January 1st each year to simplify grouping the horses for racing. As of the first of the year, Mia turned 25, but the actual day of her birth is February 13. One of the volunteers from This Old Horse, who has developed a special fondness for Mia, stopped by yesterday with a treat for her: a mixture of some sweet feed, carrots, and peppermint.
The other three horses all got a token serving of carrots to munch.
Happy February Birthdays to Mia and Asher!
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Driveway Series
Imagine if Thursday the 13th was a thing. Today would be that day. Maybe it would have a good connotation, leading to “Happy Thursday the 13th” salutations! Maybe not. Just a random thought.
Walking back from the barn Tuesday afternoon, I spotted some things that prompted me to pull out my phone camera.
The first was the way icicles from a drip off the corner of the shop garage were forming on the branch of the pine tree there. There was just enough wind blowing around that corner that it caused the icicles to spread at a variety of sideways angles.
As long as I had the phone out, I saw a series of interesting shapes and designs as I walked toward the house. They have become my “Driveway Series.” It’s always difficult for me to single out one image, and in this case, I think they all belong together, to be viewed like links on a chain.
There is a story I remembered that I wasn’t able to tell before yesterday’s interview ended. I’ve hesitated to share it because it is really Cyndie’s to tell, but we have continued to laugh about it long enough that I think you all will get a chuckle out of it, too.
While in California last week, she and her friends visited a Korean spa for special salt-scrub massages. Cyndie and one of the friends had experienced a luxuriously dreamy steam and body exfoliation treatment on gold marble at a Middle Eastern spa in Vancouver years back and had visions of reliving that experience. However, this traditional Korean sauna did things differently.
Some highlights that Cyndie pointed out include the mandatory absence of any covering on their bodies to keep the water clean for all customers. After showering, they soaked in a hot tub that was so hot, Cyndie needed to sit up. She was instructed to get back down all the way into the water. When it came time for exfoliation, Cyndie said it felt like the tiny Korean masseuse put on gloves with 60 grit sandpaper and proceeded to “sand” Cyndie’s flesh from top to bottom, front to back. No time for tears, as the scalding hot coconut milk was poured over her and she was told to wash her face with it.
Then Cyndie was sent to the showers to wash it all off. Upon returning, it was time for the hot oil massage. She was ready for the soothing and relaxing massage, but received a bruising, sharp-elbow deep muscle massage.
Now, the part that we’ve been laughing about since. While massaging her, the masseuse finally commented, “Must been bad car accident, eh?”
Cyndie chose not to explain all her scars from joint replacements and other surgeries and simply agreed. Then, while her eyes were closed, she received an unexpected slap of a freezing cold seaweed facial.
The wonderfully sincere Korean woman then commented as she peeled back the seaweed mask, “You must have been very pretty when you were young.” She meant it in the nicest possible way, which makes it all the funnier to us.
The whole experience sounded like a rare massage where Cyndie came out a little tighter than when she went in. At least she came home with a memory to laugh about.
I must say, her back did eventually feel really soft after all the tiny scabs had flaked off.
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Relative Something 