Posts Tagged ‘Carhartt bib overalls’
Faint Dusting
We have officially received our first snow of the season overnight. With temperatures well below freezing, the flakes were dry enough that there was no threat of the horses getting wet, which is a relief. We hadn’t ended up putting blankets on them.
Cyndie did, however, put blankets on two of the evergreens in the labyrinth.
They are wrapped in burlap to protect them from freezer burn during the winter.
When I saw the wind chill was down in the single digits (F), I pulled out my quilted Carhartt overalls, which are a significant part of what I call my “spacesuit” against the winter conditions. It’s that time of year, I guess. I hardly needed them the last two years. Maybe this year will be different.
We have had an orange cat behaving more boldly about being on our property lately, which is putting Asher in a bit of a tracking frenzy. Two days ago, the cat showed up in our barn while Cyndie was down there to retrieve the feed buckets. Luckily, she had left Asher in the house on this occasion.
The cat kept meowing at Cyndie and approaching her, so she decided to walk toward the closest neighbor’s place to see if the cat would act like that was where it belonged.
Yesterday, the cat showed up again, this time while I was cleaning up manure among the horses, and Asher was watching behind the gates of the overhang.
When I spotted it and hollered to Cyndie in hopes of her confining Asher, the dog saw it, too. Chaos ensued.
Asher squeezed under the fence and raced toward the cat. The horses startled and took off in a sprint, just missing clobbering me. I hollered at the dog, Cyndie hollered, and the cat waited until Asher circled just enough for it to dash off for the nearest tree.
We succeeded in luring Asher away with the help of his e-collar, but the cat remained in that tree for long after.
Cyndie posted a notice on the Nextdoor app in search of a possible owner. She feels the cat was behaving less like an outdoor stray, of which there are many in the area, and more like an indoor cat with a relationship to people. I’m not equally convinced.
There was no sign of it this morning, so maybe Asher’s harsh confrontation was enough encouragement to persuade the cat to seek attention elsewhere. That would be great for my heart. Facing the possibility of getting trampled by the horses was a little more adrenaline than I care for first thing in the morning.
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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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Relative Something 