Posts Tagged ‘Asher’
Precious Pause
The fine art of knowing how to pause to enjoy the beauty of a moment is not lost on me. Tall grass is already swallowing the bottom wire of our fence line and making it difficult to discern some of our trails through the woods, but the weeping crabapple tree beside the freshly mowed labyrinth is flowering.
Asher and I decided to take a break from landscaping chores and bask in the shade beneath the falling flower petals while being serenaded by our new resident Baltimore orioles.
It was blissful to the extreme, right up to the point where the fabric of the rocking chair ripped, sending a surge of adrenaline coursing through my reaction system.
That chair is the second of a pair. The first one is up in the shop garage, currently beating me in a challenge to remove the remains of its ripped old fabric in my overambitious intentions to renovate it. Well, now there are two. It’s a shame, because the rocking frame still looks like it has life in it.
At this point, we will be better off buying replacements and leaving the remains of the old ones to be turned into some funky art conversation piece. I always wanted to learn to weld. Hmm.
The pause was cut short, and we got on with the next cutting project that caught my attention. I had already done a fair amount of work with the string trimmer the previous day, so I pushed the riding mower to its limits, knocking down the tall grass on each side of the North Loop trail.
For the record, I was able to trigger the error code for the blade motor overtemp toward the end of the effort. At least now I know what I’m dealing with and have a solution in the works. I can still get the machine to work if I avoid cutting where the growth is too thick or tall.
As a bonus, allowing the mower time to cool down will give me more opportunities to pause and bask in the beauty of our surrounding scenery and its wildlife serenades.
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Good Boi
For the record, I mowed the entire backyard yesterday and didn’t trip a single error code. Right now, I’m inclined to think that is because I have already placed an order for a replacement motor.
I wrote last Tuesday that we had lost the controller for Asher’s e-collar for a few days. He ended up spending some time back on leash and some time free to roam near the house while we were in the vicinity. Now that we have returned to his normal routine, he has been behaving exceptionally well.
When we’ve lost sight of him for a long enough time to seem concerning, we’ve been finding him parked outside a barn door or up in the front yard, calmly keeping watch over his kingdom.
Yesterday, he seemed particularly comfortable staying in the front yard, regardless of what I was doing. Choosing to leave him be, I snuck around behind the shop, planning to make my way to the end of the driveway to retrieve the empty trash bin.
When I got to the road and checked the mailbox, I spotted Asher at the top of the first rise near our rocking chairs on the lookout spot along the driveway. He was well aware of my movements and came up to a spot where he could keep an eye on me, without showing a need to come all the way to the road. I liked that.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had been using the string trimmer and stopped off to rest beside him when I was done. I hadn’t even noticed how much debris was sticking to my pants until I sat down with him. It didn’t seem to bother him one bit, as he decided to use my knee as a pillow as long as I was there.
These kinds of days are so much more pleasant than the ones where he decides to sprint off-property and get a mile up the road before I catch him.
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Getting Grumpy
Don’t mind me, I’m just grumpy because the Minnesota Wild are getting thumped by Colorado in this second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. If the puck had bounced in just a little bit better direction for us last night, things might have turned out differently. The Wild are now trailing 3 games to 1 in the best-of-7 series. I will not be anticipating a 3-game sweep to happen in our favor to keep our season from ending in the second round.
Or maybe I’m grumpy because I have been unable to solve a problem with my electric riding mower that regularly shuts down the PTO with an over-temp error code after a very short period of use. I have a thermal imaging device that indicates the actual temperatures are barely warmer than normal room temperature.
I spent a lot of time on the phone with the manufacturer and a designated service provider yesterday, but have made little in the way of helpful progress. Negotiations are ongoing. Too bad the grass doesn’t take a break from growing while I’m dealing with mechanical issues.
Thankfully, the asphalt repair crew showed up as promised and did a bang-up job of making cracks disappear.
It was intriguing to watch them scrape off the upper layer of material after heating it with torches. They brought chunks of old asphalt and melted them down to make an almost good-as-new patch. Asphalt artists, those guys.
The bonus on the day was finding the controller for Asher’s e-collar that had come unhooked from Cyndie’s pocket a few days ago. We’d thought it was lost for good, and Cyndie had even purchased a different version of collar as a replacement. We hadn’t figured out the more complicated controls on that one yet, so we will now happily return it and go back to using the one we are all familiar with.
Those were just enough happy outcomes to balance out the grumpiness over the hometown hockey team loss and the error-prone riding mower.
At least I’m not entering a new decade of years today like someone else I know. Happy Birthday, Marbare!! That number sounds a lot older than my age. Hope you will be celebrating in the least grumpy of ways! Love to you!
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Pushing Abilities
One moment of losing focus on the task at hand can have unwelcome consequences. I took a blow to the leg when I least expected it; a smack hard enough to bruise bone and break the skin. No, it wasn’t while using the chainsaw, nor the string trimmer or hedge trimmer. I stubbed my leg against one of the rocks along the front of our fireplace.
Is this why running in the house is frowned upon? I was fully engaged in Asher’s favorite indoor pastime of pursuing him and the toy in his mouth as he ran laps around the spiral staircase and the furniture in the living room.
The game came to a screaming halt, with the screaming coming from me as I wailed over the sudden crippling pain. Cyndie worried I’d seriously injured myself, not having a clue what had caused my outburst. I worried I might never walk again.
Okay, that is an unnecessary exaggeration. Some quick first-aid in the form of an ice pack from Cyndie and elevation had me back functional in about 30 minutes. The extent of the wound serves as an indication of just how fast I can get moving on two feet, so I see it as a badge of my athletic prowess. Still, I wasn’t fast enough to catch Asher.
The bruised leg didn’t prevent me from making some impressive progress on pushing the abilities of my Greenworks riding mower to mow along the fence line from inside the pastures.
It’s asking a lot from the machine to cut such tall, thick grass where the surface is dramatically uneven with divots from horse hooves, piles of dirt from gophers, and some unavoidable piles of manure. The effort is compounded by the occasional plugging of the mower exit chute and the fully understandable interruption of the PTO when a blade motor over-temp sensor is tripped.
I learned from a Greenworks support technician that a blade of grass can get up inside a gap along the spindle to cause the error that trips the sensor and shuts down the blades. The only time that has been a problem for me is when I try mowing where the grass is too much for this mower, so it’s not the machine’s fault.
Since I now know how to solve the issue, it’s not that concerning, and I find myself more willing to push the machine beyond its limits. I stumbled a little bit the first time it happened yesterday because I was getting a second error code that had me walking back to the shop to charge a battery in hopes of limping the mower back to the garage. Reviewing the manual for error codes alerted me that I hadn’t reset the PTO button to “off” after the blade motor sensor tripped.
The mower won’t start with the PTO in the “on” position. D’oh!
As soon as I resolved all the issues, I was back in business. It worked so well the rest of the way, I continued to mow pasture away from the fence. The area around the round pen is a hassle to navigate with the diesel tractor and brush hog, so the more I can do with the little riding mower, the better.
It’s as impressive as heck that the Greenworks zero-turn riding mower is up to handling everything I push it to do.
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Painful Dislocation
What a way to wake up. All she did was sit up in bed, and suddenly Cyndie yelped that her jaw had dislocated. We were both dumbfounded. While she whimpered in pain and desperately tried to self-analyze what was going on and how to resolve it, I felt totally incapable of doing anything to help.
I’ve had my jaw pop out of joint before, and it was incredibly painful and scary, but it was only momentary. With no logical trigger for what had occurred to Cyndie, we feared that a correction may be beyond our reach. I wondered if I would be driving her to urgent care, and whether I should try to take care of the dog and horses before going, when Cyndie reported she had managed to get her jaw back into position.
At least that ended her crying over the intense pain. It’s brutal to be the observer when the closest person to you is visibly and audibly suffering in acute pain, and there is little you can do to fix things.
As awful as that is, at least there’s no physical pain involved. No one goes unscathed, though.
After a morning that started like that, the rest of the day is wide open for improvement. Cyndie was able to rally and resume her planned art class in Hudson, and Asher and I carried out our duties, living a life of luxury at home.
As I was getting Asher ready to go out for a walk, I opened the door without looking to let him charge after a squirrel or rabbit or whatever threat he imagined was out there. It was after he took off like a shot that I spotted the delivery truck coming up the driveway.
As fast as I let him run, I was suddenly hollering at him to stop and grappling with the ecollar controller to push the alert button to distract his focus away from the vehicle. He obeyed just barely enough that the driver made it three-quarters of the way and rolled down his window to hand me a package. I grabbed Asher’s collar to keep him in place while the driver turned around to depart.
Later in the day, I was spectacularly successful in convincing Asher to hang out close by while I pushed the mower through the labyrinth for the first cut of the season. Mia wandered out into the back pasture to graze, and Asher made himself comfortable, sprawling out to survey the horizon for anything else that moved.
It feels very rewarding to be able to accomplish the first cut before the growth has gotten too far along. The hardest part of the job is pushing the mower over the raised ridges from the voles that think they own the place.
Cleaning the deck afterwards, I scraped as much dirt as I did grass clippings.
It was a good finish to a day that started out a lot scarier.
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Lovely Feast
On the Sunday Christians celebrate Easter, Cyndie likes to shower her family with love in the form of food she spends days preparing. It was as delicious as ever. This year, she also made customized Easter cards for everyone, adorned with a variety of creative bunny faces (plus one bunny tail), which she hand-painted using colorful acrylic paints.
Having so many people to cuddle and beg for scratches is normally to Asher’s delight, but yesterday was a little challenging for him. Steve and Jessica brought their little dog, Vern, for the visit. I would describe Asher’s behavior as ‘tentatively tolerating’ in the presence of the highly active intruder who showed up in his space.
They coexisted, but didn’t become fast friends. It was actually the second time they had met, although that was many months ago. Their interactions then were pretty cute, but Vern was more of an oblivious puppy at the time, and Asher seemed to accept that nothing about him was a threat. Yesterday, Vern was more interested in Asher’s undercarriage, and that pushed Asher to become a little more wary of his presence.
Our big boy has convinced us that he has outgrown sleeping in his crate overnight. He curls up just fine in there, but he can’t fully stretch out when he wants to. A few nights of repeated (uncharacteristic) whining was all it took to earn him the privilege of now sleeping on the floor at the foot of our bed. He luxuriously stretches to his fullest extent between periods of curling up like a sled dog hiding in a snowstorm.
The photo above shows Asher keeping Cyndie company while she was painting bunnies in our den. He is neither curled up nor stretched out on the bed in that image.
It really was a lovely feast yesterday; however, the fact that Cyndie shows her love by feeding people special treats is beginning to overwhelm my limited willpower to resist. I ate way more of the foods that aren’t on my healthy diet plan than I should have. Calories consumed have not been balanced with calories burned for too many months in a row.
It’s great to be loved this much, but I am not a fan of the expanding inches of my middle.
I wonder if I could rig up a contraption so that her oven is powered by me pedaling a stationary bike. Those darn lemon or vanilla-frosted buttery biscuit cookies she just made are killers for my former ability to stop at just one. I am powerless to resist.
There is so much love in every bite, I bet these cookies could stop a war.
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Distributing Treats
We thought the rain would arrive during the afternoon yesterday based on the radar scans, but it didn’t start falling until well after dark. In the middle of the afternoon, we made a special trip to the barn to team up on putting rain sheets on the horses. To my surprise, Mia didn’t move away as we were covering the other three while plying them with treats.
Since she was right there, I tossed a lead rope over her neck and offered her a few treat bites, while Cyndie quickly wrangled a sheet over her back. Mia was doing fine, but there were leg straps on the back that Cyndie didn’t want to bother Mia with, so she was trying to knot them up to keep them from dragging. While she was doing that, the other horses started to crowd us, hoping for more treats.
We ended up in bad positioning, and Mix decided to lash out at Mia with a kick. That riled us up, and things got a little chaotic as Cyndie and I took turns chastising Mix while trying to calm all the others and not lose the progress on getting Mia’s sheet fully buckled.
It never pays to take shortcuts. We really should have staged them on separate sides before starting, but having them all standing together made it tempting to go for it before any of them had time to reject the idea. In the end, we got them all covered in advance of the cold and wet conditions that could last for the next few days.
Cyndie saw a video of a homemade indoor activity challenge that we thought Asher would go for, so we collected the pieces and strung them up yesterday.
His favorite toy of late is a ball that we put some of his dry food in for him to roll around until individual bites fall out from all the gyrating. We thought he would surely get excited to flip the cups and bottles on a string to gobble up all the pieces that drop out.
Well, he showed little interest in having anything to do with this plastic trash that he knows is off-limits when it is in the recycle bin. I thought it was good that he could see the treats at the bottom, but he’d probably like it more if they were painted bright orange to look more like dog toys similar to his ball.
He doesn’t need to see the food inside them; he knew what was in there from across the room because he could smell it. He simply wanted those enticing tidbits to be in his orange ball, the way he likes it.
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Overlapping Naps
Asher and I headed down to the barn mid-morning to retrieve the feed buckets and clean up any fresh messes under the overhang. The first thing I noticed when we stepped out of the house was Mia standing all alone in the round pen. We found the other three horses huddled together on one side of the overhang, positioned so the warm sunshine was covering one full side of each of them.
It was a normal hour for them to be napping, and they appeared to be all in at the moment. Mix really should have found a spot to lie down, because she was ridiculously close to toppling to the ground. Her head sagged lower and lower as her slumber deepened, until it almost touched the ground, and her back legs buckled, jarring her awake for an instant.
When I finished cleaning up around them, I opened the back door of the barn for Asher to lead us on an agenda-less walk. He slowly made his way past the old chicken coop until we were parallel with Mia in the round pen.
There, he sat down to survey the distance for activity, so I sat down beside him. This is one of my great joys of retirement. There was nowhere else I needed to be and nothing else I needed to do in that moment. When Asher eventually lay down, I did, too. I placed a hand on his back and closed my eyes. If I fell asleep and he moved, I hoped I would notice.
I didn’t feel myself falling asleep, but when some sounds and movement suddenly brought me back to consciousness, I could tell I had dozed off. The sound that woke me was Mix arriving and posturing to lie down just on the other side of the fence beside us. She must have gotten fed up with almost falling over. Beyond Mix, I noticed that Mia had already lain down to nap inside the round pen.
It was a wonderfully idyllic scene, the four of us all napping together, except that when Mix lay down, she rolled on her back and rubbed her face and sides on the grass before settling, and those gyrations happening so close to us brought Asher to his feet to observe the spectacle more closely.
I wanted the horses to be able to enjoy a moment of deep sleep on the ground, so to give them more space, I got up with Asher and invited him to continue our meandering stroll around the property.
It was okay that we didn’t get to linger there with them. I was tickled that Mix had shown up to join us while we were snoozing. We were doing overlapping naps.
The horses don’t stay on the ground very long, anyway. As Asher and I followed the back pasture fence line around past the labyrinth, I could see that Swings had come to the far side of the paddock to join in the ground napping, but Mix had already returned to her feet.
Midday napping in the warm spring sunshine is a luxury not to be passed up when the forecast for the next 4 days is filled with threats of cold air and a freezing mix of precipitation.
Of course, Asher and I will simply move our overlapping naps indoors until winter finishes with its latest unnecessary after-the-fact tantrum.
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Watchin’ Basketball
I have trouble understanding how basketball referees decide when contact is a foul and when it isn’t. Last night’s four games of the sweet sixteen round of the NCAA Men’s were fun to watch, despite how often players “walk” with the ball and don’t get whistled for it.
Tonight, I will switch back to watching the Women play, since the lady Gophers are still alive in their tournament, having survived to the sweet sixteen for the first time since 2005. Wish us luck against UCLA.
There was a little competition for space in a chair between Asher and Cyndie yesterday. Not all sports were happening in tournaments. Our grand-nephew, Drew, stopped by for a visit from his dorm at UWRF, and that had Asher all excited and seeking nonstop attention.
Cyndie whipped up some Italian Beef sandwiches for dinner and served some fresh-baked goodies for dessert. Her buttery, super-sweet granola cookies were a big hit. I think I may have exceeded my daily sugar ration simply by looking at them. I ate several of them, just to make sure.
It’s a bad time to be consuming excess calories, since I spend a lot less time being active when there are so many March Madness games on TV, grabbing my entertainment attention. This would be a great case for powering the television with a treadmill. Then the only way I could watch would be by exercising.
In the meantime, my body at rest stays at rest.
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Horses Walkabout
Just because something has never gone completely wrong before doesn’t guarantee it won’t happen eventually. Horses have an amazing ability for stealth when they so choose. If one were to leave barn doors unlatched and the alleyway gates unchained while focused on adding a few shovels of lime screenings under the overhang, like Cyndie did last night, who knows what could happen?
Cyndie had taken Asher along in the fading daylight after dinner on a trip to the barn to collect empty feed buckets. I was comfortable on the couch in the loft in my after-shower night clothes when I got a call from her, informing me that the horses had gotten out.
There is no hesitation to be had when receiving a message like this. I slipped my bare feet into boots and stepped out the front door to greet all four horses in the yard, looking rather unsettled. My presence was enough to turn them back toward the direction of the barn, where I could hear Cyndie shouting for Asher, who was darting about as if he couldn’t decide whether to herd them or prance around along with them.
Thankfully, when the horses showed a hint of interest in getting back to their safe space, Cyndie was able to open a gate to the small paddock and usher them through it with gentle encouragement.
It had only taken a few seconds of Cyndie being distracted with her task for the horses to move themselves silently up to the unchained alleyway gates and nose their way through. She spotted them as the last of the four disappeared into the barn. Asher had been out by the hay shed, but came running into the barn through the small front door to see what was up.
They must have passed each other because he popped out under the overhang to let Cyndie know something was totally out of order. The horses apparently went straight out the small front door Asher had just come in, because by the time Cyndie got in there after them, they were gone.
She told me they had headed down the driveway in the opposite direction from the house when she called me. From the high point on the driveway, near our rocking chairs on the lookout spot, Cyndie said the horses turned and sprinted on the asphalt at full speed toward the house.
I’m sorry I missed that. It must have been a raucous clamor of hooves and a spectacular sight.
The rule violation that occurred is having left both small barn doors unlatched at the same time that the alleyway gates were unchained. The inside ones can be optional, but only if the outside doors are all latched.
The odds of one, let alone all four of the horses, choosing to test and immediately pass silently through the unchained gates at a time when both barn doors were also unlatched are very unlikely.
But it could happen. They proved that emphatically last night.
Relative Something 