Not Static
Nothing is as static as my mind tends to imagine it to be. The constant changes and endless activity I have witnessed on our property in the past 3 years are convincing me that my general impression of the world has been a gross oversimplification of reality.
I think I’ve already written about my amazement over how relatively fluid the “solid ground” actually is. I know that farmers who need to pick rocks out of their tilled fields year after year are well aware of this ‘fluidity.’
Yesterday, a day that was about as plain as an uneventful winter day can be, I was trudging up one of my shortcut paths through the trees between our barn and the house when I suddenly became aware of all the debris collecting on the snow covering the ground.
It is a blaring announcement about how much activity is actually occurring in the seemingly static days that have followed last week’s snow storm. I’m guessing that squirrels are responsible for much of the shrapnel that has fallen from the trees, but I expect there are plenty of other less visible actors in the constant change taking place.
I need only look to the manure pile to witness evidence of the microscopic players at work in a feat of perpetual transition. Even though growing things all appear to be in a winter state of dead or dormant, the manure pile continues to cook at 140° F. There is an amazing amount of activity going on in the center of that pile.
I used to think there were two states of a mouse trap: tripped, or not. Now I know there is a third one. It is called, gone. I have lost too many mouse traps to count. Before we went out of town last Thursday, I added new peanut butter bait to the two traps in the garage. It had been too many days in a row without any evidence of activity, and I knew better. The mice had definitely lost interest in the traps.
The tally upon our return was, one trap with a mouse in it, and one trap gone. I don’t know if a mouse got caught in the trap and something else hauled it off somewhere, or the trap snapped on a mouse that could still run away, dragging the trap with it.
My response to all this is that I am not going to devise any single solution to situations that arise. I will endeavor to change the way I deal with things just as often as the challenges morph in new and different ways.
It’s not any spectacular new innovation. I’d say it’s pretty much how things have been throughout time. I’m just coming to a realization that I can choose to frame my perspective differently.
You could say I am planning to observe and respond to situations with more fluidity.
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Favorite Photos
Holy cow, this year is flying by. It’s the 3rd day of January already! We are home again, and I’m happy to report that Delilah did great on the 4-hour drive from Grand Rapids, Minnesota to Beldenville, Wisconsin.
Today, I hope to do as little as possible in the way of productive endeavors, unless they involve power-lounging and idling away the time with trivial pursuits (which have their own way of feeling productive sometimes). I will mentally prepare for the return to the week of work that follows the New Year celebrations. Everything that was being held in suspended animation during the holidays will be released for a return to the regular grind.
Our next paid holiday doesn’t arrive for 5-months! At least the daylight hours will gradually be getting longer during that otherwise ominously staid period of time.
On that cheery note, I will endeavor to bring some pleasure to these proceedings with a sampling of a few of my favorite photos to emerge from our weekend visit with Barb and Mike.
The first two were taken by Barb when the lake was just in the process of freezing, and she generously shared them with me. The close-up shot is right out of my bag of tricks, so of course I love it the most. I asked her how she got it to be black and white, and Barb replied, “It’s not.” I love that it looks like there is no color in the captured image.
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This next one is mine. I took a picture of the water flowing beneath a dam, wanting to capture the water droplets on the edge of the forming ice. After zooming in, I was surprised to find the lines that look like a drawn-in animation. A moment after that, the whole thing took on a look of being more a painting than a photo. I’m really happy with it.
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Wonderful Adventures
We enjoyed a fabulous day of wonderful adventures on the first day of 2016 up in the woods of northern Minnesota with our friends Barb and Mike. I captured some evidence.
We went for a walk in the woods of their nearby property…
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We went for a walk on their lake. It is a very, very deep water lake, and only recently froze over. We mostly stayed close to the shore. The ice thickness was reported as being just enough to support foot traffic, but nothing beyond that yet.
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I wore my festive hat that the Morales family bought for me when they visited us at Wintervale a couple of Christmases ago. Perfect!
We topped off the incredible day with a visit to a neighboring property where I experienced two amazing firsts. This family hosts an annual New Year celebration with their own custom fireworks show. I have never stood that close to a show that was that big and that spectacular. I’m happy to report, we all survived unscathed. Did I mention it was spectacular?
Too bad my hasty attempt at capturing one of the explosions with my pocket camera didn’t do it the justice it deserves.
The other first for me was witnessing this brilliant design for burning a one log fire in a vertical position. What amazed me was that I hadn’t come across this before in my 56 years of existence. I want to make some!
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Newest Year
This is the newest year ever! 2016 is brand spankin’ new. I hope your greeting from the 1st day of January this year was a friendly one.
Our drive north yesterday, with Delilah along for her first long car trip, went better than we imagined it might. She did great. She settled in amazingly well at the cabin of our good friends, Barb & Mike Wilkus. It helps that Mike is especially good with dogs, greeting her with a treat, right from the start.
After a fantastic steak dinner, he offered Delilah a bone to chew. I think I noticed her swooning over him. She has a new best friend.
At Delilah’s usual bed time, Cyndie put her in her crate and dropped the cover over it, and we moved to the kitchen to play cards. After a short while, Delilah began to whine in her bed. Cyndie decided to give Delilah a little more time with us while we were still up. The dog was as happy as could be over her good fortune.
Later, to top off an otherwise stellar day of good behavior, Delilah ended up putting herself back to bed in her crate when she got tired. Cute and very helpful! We are confident she is feeling very, very comfortable here.
Goodbye to the year 2015. Bring on the new year, the newest year, 2016!
Look out, new year. Here we come.
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Loose Ends
I happened to glance back at a couple of posts and noticed a few story lines I have been remiss in maintaining. For those of you hanging on the edge of your seats in wait for a resolution to these mini-dramas, I offer the following to tie up some loose ends:
The “Check Engine” light on my car turned out to be a bad oxygen sensor in my catalytic converter. Our local auto shop reset the warning light and put in an order for a replacement sensor. In the mean time, it is okay to drive my car, which is a good thing because I really needed the all-wheel-drive yesterday to safely navigate the hazardous winter commute into work.
Oh, that answers Tuesday’s closing line: I did go into work yesterday. I scrambled out of bed as soon as I woke up, noticing that my alarm had been playing the radio for 3 minutes, and headed outside to plow the driveway. We received between 4-5 inches overnight. It kept snowing all day, adding another approx. 4 inches, requiring that I plow again after I got home.
Finally, it is feeling distinctly wintery around here.
I’ve neglected to share one of the special treats Cyndie bestowed on me at our family gift exchange, and it fits nicely with the subject of tying up loose ends. Now that she is not working away from home anymore, Cyndie has been able to give time to projects that have long been dormant.
One task she dug into this fall was to open up some boxes that have been ignored since we moved here back in 2012. She found tee shirts belonging to the kids and me that she had been saving to make memory blankets. Feeling as though she should follow through on that plan, since we paid movers to haul the dang boxes all this way, she busied herself with crafting 3 different blankets in time to present to us all for Christmas.
My siblings may recognize a few of these panels from over 40 years ago.
I’m not sure which I value more… the blanket of treasured memories, or the fact she finally made use of something that we’ve been hauling around and storing, everywhere we’ve lived, for almost 4-decades.
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Spaghetti Demo
I found the perfect gift to give Cyndie for Christmas: a kitchen pasta making machine. Last night, our friend and neighbor, George Walker invited us over for dinner and demonstrated how to make spaghetti noodles from scratch. By the time we arrived, he had already created the dough, so the bulk of what we got to see was the process of rolling it out and cutting it into strips.
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With Cyndie’s experience in baking from scratch, making spaghetti seems like a natural variation she could expand into. Now that I’ve seen the process in person, I’m convinced it is something she can do. After tasting the results of George’s effort, I believe making fresh spaghetti will be well worth her time.
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After dinner I got a chance to play George’s resonator guitar that lays flat in the lap and is played using a steel slide bar. It seems to me that an instrument like that would be good for me to have for entertaining Cyndie while she is making pasta noodles with her new machine.
How come I get all these brilliant ideas after Santa has already come and gone for the season?
It was a good thing that we only had a short drive home at the end of the evening, because it was snowing so much that it looked like the light-speed view from Star Wars hyperdrive with all the flakes blowing toward our windshield.
This morning, my day begins with some driveway plowing before I will be able to try braving the challenge of commuting on the freeways during a snow storm. That is, if I actually try getting to the day-job today…
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Yes, Snow
The snow did finally arrive in the nick of time and with the necessary permanence to declare our Christmas a white one.
Now we are facing a threat of significantly more snow falling smack dab in the middle of an already short week at the day-job. That’s gonna complicate things.
I will be bringing an overnight bag with me to work today, to prepare for the possibility I decide to forego the long commute and stay in town at Cyndie’s parents house.
Complicating my planning is the fact that the check engine light came on in my Subaru on the way home during the last trip of 4 we traveled to the cities for Christmas events. I had just gotten it back from the shop last Thursday, and I am concerned about this occurring so soon after that.
I will be driving Cyndie’s car today, once again confusing my automobile operating habits. Her cruise control feature is on the opposite side of the steering wheel from my car. Also, her car has a volume control for the radio built into the steering wheel, which I love.
In just a couple days of driving her car last week while mine was in the shop, I found some of my habits altered enough that I fumbled a bit when getting my car back. I kept trying to change the volume of the radio on the steering wheel.
Switching back to Cyndie’s car again will likely mix me up even more, right at a time when I need to avoid distraction and focus on the hazards of driving during a snow storm.
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Slow Motion
Our kids came to visit yesterday and we celebrated a Christmas gift exchange between just the four of us on Boxing Day. We took Delilah for a walk, visiting the labyrinth and then the horses.
We were all in the paddock, milling about amongst the herd. I had grabbed a pitch fork and was cleaning up manure. When I lifted the fork up and knocked some frozen manure off a board, it startled Hunter and his reaction set off the herd panic reaction. I turned to see Julian deftly react with a leaping side-step as Hunter bolted past, barely averting a collision. Delilah tried to shrink herself as Hunter ran right over her.
I didn’t see how Elysa and Cyndie avoided being run over by Legacy and Cayenne behind me, but somehow the dangerous “emergency evacuation” by the horses was carried out without causing anyone physical harm. Seconds later, the horses looked around and sensed there was no threat, returning to their previous stations as if nothing had happened.
It’s possible the horses had not entirely recovered from the high alert they were on earlier in the day, when coyote hunters and their baying dogs were creating a ruckus in the vicinity.
On the way up toward the house, Cyndie pulled out discs to throw for Delilah, and Julian pulled out his phone to record slow motion video of the action.
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At the beginning of each video, Delilah has one disc in her mouth, which we tell her to drop before chasing the next toss. We have to hustle to pick up the one she drops, because her real goal is to try to get both discs and keep them away from us, despite how much she loves chasing after them when we fling ’em.
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Truly Best
Our Christmas celebrations this year have provided a wonderful addition to years of fabulous Christmases with Cyndie’s family. Now that we live in Wisconsin, the routine for us has settled into a pattern of driving back and forth to Edina on Christmas eve, and then two more times on Christmas day. This allows us to participate in spectacular meals, and all that comes with them, as well as tend to the care of Delilah and our horses back home.
I’m used to driving that route, so it doesn’t bother me. The trouble comes in accounting for that extra hour that always separates us from our intended destination. It becomes a struggle to get out of the house on time to arrive at the celebration by the appointed hour.
Then we need to watch the clock while enjoying the time of our lives so that we don’t end up forcing our dog to wait too long without us at home. Sure wish we could just ask Scotty to beam us home. We always want to stay longer at the social gathering, but without it resulting in such a late return to our home an hour away.
I enjoyed two particular “bests” yesterday that deserve specific mention. Cyndie’s mother, Marie, is a master hostess who prepares world-class meals for large numbers of guests. The traditional family dinner of beef tenderloin on Christmas day is one of my favorites. It is magical, because no matter what variations may occur every year, it is always the best meal I have ever had.
This year, it was even better than that.
Honestly, I struggle to justify enjoying such gastronomical pleasure. The dessert which followed the best-dinner-ever included a cranberry cake with a caramel sauce topping that always tastes so amazing, it should be recognized as a dangerous weapon and require a license to prepare.
I received some very nice gifts from very generous people this Christmas, but there is one that immediately claimed my heart as the best possible thing I opened. We draw names for a gift exchange in Cyndie’s family, and this year, my fellow in-law, Sara, wife of Cyndie’s brother, Ben, picked my name out of the hat.
She nailed the precise art of matching a gift to the recipient, and steeped it in her own joy while creating it. Sara made a wood-burned image of our Wintervale logo on a beautiful pine board. I find it absolutely beautiful to look at. It smells good, too!
It is the best gift.
I just want to look at it again and again. It is one of a kind, made by Sara’s hands, and intended specifically for me. What a precious thing.
I had a very merry Christmas.
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