Spring Things
For the first time in months, I finally got my car washed yesterday. The once shiny blue car was an ugly gray mess of accumulated salty road spray. The temperature didn’t get above freezing yesterday, but it was sunny enough for the March sunshine to be effective at making it feel warmer than it really was. The line at the car wash was long and the wait was even longer, but it felt worth the pause to get it taken care of before the next blast of precipitation starts the accumulation all over again.
There is a real sense of impending change lingering in the air around our place now that the daily low temperature readings are no longer negative numbers and the high temperatures are headed above freezing for a couple of days. The higher sun angle and the later sunset hour are probably contributing the most to the feelings of transition that are upon us.
The horses are already showing signs of shedding their winter growth. Delilah seems to have more energy than ever. Unfortunately, she has started a pattern of barking at the sound of a neighbor’s dog 10-acres distant who sits in a kennel and “shouts” a lot. I’m grateful that Delilah has chosen to just sit on our hill and bark back at the dog, as opposed to run off in search of it.
We think Mozyr has resumed his misbehavior of peeing where he shouldn’t. The other night, he did it on our bed while we were right there, distracted by a video Cyndie had leaned forward to view on my computer. When she leaned back, her hand discovered the wet spot. What the heck!? Now I keep thinking I’m smelling urine in the air in several places, but I can never sniff out a location on surfaces. Even though I almost don’t want to see the truth, we are going to get one of the UV lights that will illuminate the spots where the cats have peed. Obviously, it is important for us to know, but at the same time, I really don’t want to discover what I expect will be the vast number of incidents.
I stopped by the hardware store on the way home yesterday to see if my lawn mower blades had been sharpened and ready for pickup. They weren’t, waylaid by the onslaught of problem snowblowers that had been brought in after the last mega-snowfall. I thought I was being smart to get my blades taken care of during the off-season, when they wouldn’t be inundated with lawnmowers needing similar attention, but it’s only logical that there isn’t really an “off-season” at a hardware store. At least I got them in at a time when I won’t be needing them if the wait takes longer than I expected.
This coming weekend, we move the clocks ahead one hour for the start of Daylight Saving Time, and in two weeks from today the vernal equinox arrives. Spring is here! That means only about two and half months left when we are at risk of getting bombed by a monster snow storm. Isn’t that encouraging!
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Snow Motion
Last time it snowed during the day here, I tried over and over to capture a picture that would show how many flakes were falling. No matter what I tried, the moment in time of the snapshot would render the majority of the flakes invisible. The only way I could see it working was in a video.
With an assist from my son, Julian, we got the video converted to a gif image. Seems like it would be a great idea for a holiday greeting card.
Happy Winter of 2013/2014 Everyone!
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Thank you so much for the gift of your time and energies at a time when you are especially busy, Julianbert!
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Marching Ahead
We’ve made it to the month of March, always a milestone in our northern winters. The other day I noticed that the hour of our sunset has reached 6:00 p.m. That’s a big difference from that shortest day of sunlight in December, when darkness descends way too early in the afternoon. Winter’s days are numbered now, but we know too well from our experience just a year ago, storms with significant amounts of snow can still happen as late as May around here.
With March historically bringing storms carrying large snowfall totals, we try not to get overly excited by the warm sunlight and daytime melting that is about to occur. However, I think this year it will be especially welcome. There have been precious few days above freezing the last few months, which is great for winter sports, but it has me a little anxious about what the melt will be like for us come spring.
Last year the wetness took forever to end. I can’t find any reason to believe it will be any better this year. I had hoped to strategically pile the plowed snow to minimize melt water running where we don’t want it to go, but the amount of snow that has accumulated forced the necessity of piling it anywhere and everywhere.
For now, we still need to keep clearing our way to the wood shed and to Delilah’s kennel. I finally got the path to the wood shed shoveled on Saturday, over a week after the last big storm buried everything here under the rain and then 12 inches of snow.
In March, you never really know if the effort to clear such routes is still necessary, but if you don’t do it, and another large amount of snow falls, it ends up being a real hassle. Better safe, than sorry, I believe.
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Photo Op
Shot yesterday during a visit to our neighbor’s farm. Sure, they had animals, but there I go, looking up and capturing building and sky. I am short of words after allowing myself to be taken on a journey of films last night after watching the celebration by the people who make them, The Academy Awards.
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Dust
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as if the sun
has to decide to rise
as if the earth
chooses to spin
dust accumulates
marking the passing of time
in ways that lightness and darkness
cannot
so the simple stroke
of a cleaning cloth
becomes an act
of resetting
the immeasurable perpetual advance
of some bombastic
cosmic clock
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Overactive Snowflakes
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It was an otherwise innocuous passing flurry of barely 3 inches of fluffy light snow. Delicate flakes, each one unique, falling in a graceful dance with the air, moving in a randomly synchronized patterned performance. How many snowflakes could there be? They pile up. They land on every available surface, and swerve to reach places not so available.
Yesterday’s snowfall draped itself softly over the wind-hardened drifts in the driveway to complicate an already challenging chore. I had walked over those drifts the night before when I took the garbage bin down to the road. They were packed so dense that I could walk on them without breaking through. It’s like walking on water. It’s just snow, so logic has it that a boot would submerge, but not when it gets packed this tight. Across the top I strolled.
Delilah is finding the latest snow conditions to be confounding. Sometimes she stays above, and sometimes she breaks through. At the speed she is usually traversing, it causes her to do a face-plant into the deep. Then she has to swim a bit to reach a place where she can switch to her deer-like leaps to bounce through the deepest parts.
When the snow stopped falling yesterday, there was plowing and shoveling to be done, again. Those light, teeny flakes that fall from the sky change dramatically when they come to rest en masse. They foil the attempts of machines that try to move them, causing the wheels of the tractor to spin in place against the weight of the snow.
Walking our property has become unthinkable without snowshoes. If I had time to get down to the labyrinth, I would verify that it was entirely invisible at this point, buried beneath the biggest accumulation of the year last week that was followed by the gale force winds and then topped off with the several fluffy inches yesterday.
Snowflakes are beautiful and brutal. I think that’s what makes them great.
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Pee Happens
I have grown to really appreciate my quilt-lined Carhartt bib overalls this winter. They hang at the front door and no matter what I am wearing, I can hop into them to head down to the barn for chores. When I walk in the door in the afternoon, dressed from the day-job, stepping into these overalls covers perfectly for mucking out the barn and feeding the horses.
I ran into one problem with them the other day though, when I discovered the zipper in the fly is jammed and won’t open. I don’t recall if I have broached this subject in the blog already, or not, but since moving to the country, I have peed outside more than ever before. I can pretty confidently report that I never had occasion to pee outside when we were living on a tiny lot in the suburbs.
I suppose it seems acceptable, logical even, to take breaks outside to “water the trees” when exposed (hee hee, I wrote “exposed”) to Delilah and the horses doing it so often. Maybe something in me senses the value of marking my territory.
On Monday, when I was on the diesel tractor trying to finish clearing snow from the driveway and front of the barn, I got the sense my bladder was filling, but I wanted to complete the plowing before taking a break. That was a bad decision.
Of course, the worse the urge got, the closer I would be to almost finishing. If you know me at all, you can imagine me deciding to try to get just a little more snow removed, and then cleaning up one remaining edge. One of the difficulties I have plowing with our machines is that almost every time I move snow from one spot, I spill it on another. I kept not being done yet. I guess for some reason, I decided to torture myself by not pausing and climbing down to pee. I waited so long it was getting painful, which I know better than to do. Why in the world…?
Now imagine how calm, collected, and thorough I was about getting the tractor parked in the garage. It’s a miracle I didn’t crash into something as I rushed to get it put away. Happily, I wasn’t wearing the bib overalls at the time, and I didn’t need to make my way up to the house.
With that incident fresh in mind, my discovery that the overalls zipper was jammed took on greater significance. I intend to correct that situation well before the next time I might have need to use it.
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Good Rest
I was back at the day-job yesterday and it was like a day of rest. I didn’t have to do any shoveling. Wait, I need to clarify that: didn’t have to do any snow shoveling.
When I returned home in the afternoon, I received a message from Cyndie that she wanted to put the horses in the barn overnight because of the return of extremely cold temperatures, and before we moved them in we needed to clean out the stalls. I ended up having to do a little shoveling in there.
The horses have caught on to our routines nicely. They seem very fond of the opportunities to be inside when it gets really cold. We had taken their blankets off last week when it got nice for a few days, but they went back on last night, with no complaints from the horses. We may be spoiling them, but at least they seem to appreciate the care we provide.
I was so tired on Monday night, I fell right to sleep. When I awoke, it felt like I’d had a good night’s sleep. I squinted up at the time projected on the ceiling by the clock next to Cyndie and struggled to decipher what it read, since it was upside down. Did it show 5:11? No, it was actually 11:08. I had been asleep for only a half hour and upon waking I felt like I had slept the whole night through.
Now that is what I call a good rest. Luckily, I was able to fall right back to sleep, and picking up where I left off, I enjoyed a very sound night’s sleep.
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