Posts Tagged ‘change’
Field Work
Even though it rained a bit yesterday morning, the rest of the day turned out sunny, warm, and breezy. I think we even made some small additional progress toward the ground drying out. I may be rushing things a bit, but we are driven to try to get the earliest start possible on preparing and improving our fields for hay and grazing, so I worked tenaciously to get out and do some cutting while the weather was good. We want to cut off weeds right away and give the grasses a head start toward dominating.
That meant I needed to finally complete the project I started months ago, of cleaning the bottom of the mower deck. I pulled it out into the sunshine, where I was unfortunately better able to see how much had been missed of the portions I already scraped. I sprayed it all down with a potion to inhibit grass from sticking and then mounted it beneath the lawn tractor. I was ready to mow.
The growth in this field was just a bit more than suits this mower, but it performed heroically. The two fields we want to use for grazing this summer have been left to grow wild for some time. When we got here they were 3 or 4 feet high with grasses, weeds and volunteer trees. For the past two years, I have knocked them down in the fall using the brush cutter pulled behind the diesel tractor, but I was hesitant to make a real close cut. Part of the reason is the sticks and branches that lie tangled and hidden in the grass, and part is because the terrain is pretty rough in spots.
I settled on using the lawn tractor because the ground is still too soft to drive the big tractor on without the tires cutting deep ruts. It seemed dry enough to support the lawn tractor without the wheels causing damage, and we’ve tried to pick the obvious sticks out, so it was time to see if the lawn tractor could navigate the bumps and heavy growth.
After a tentative start worked okay, we went all in and cut a pretty big section. That area also included a bald spot where we had burned a couple of brush piles, so while Cyndie finished the mowing, I got the Grizzly out and dragged a rake over the dirt/mud. Then we hooked up a seed spreader to the lawn tractor and laid down some pasture grass seed.
I looks mighty fine out there after just a few hours of work, but one thing leads to another, and now it’s time to figure out how to fence that area to contain the grazing horses we are working so hard to accommodate.
It is pretty clear from their behavior, they would like that to happen very soon.
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Days Filled
Natural processes never pause. We had a very spring-like day yesterday, starting the morning with a classic thunder shower. By the end of the day, I couldn’t see any snow left on the ground as I walked the southern fence line to repair areas where Legacy practiced his penchant for dismantling things with his teeth. The frost hasn’t gone out of the ground yet, but already there are green sprouts emerging from the dirt.
A trek around the property is an overwhelming experience of discovering all the things that deserve attention. The trick is picking the best time for each task. The terrain is too wet for many activities, but the high ground is getting close to dry enough for equipment to drive over it without leaving giant ruts. Mornings can still offer frozen ground, which invites the possibility of driving over areas that will be too muddy later in the day. Any day could bring rain, or even snow, which will quickly cause a setback in the progress of drying out the land.
We need more gravel brought in, and will want to find fill dirt to bolster areas that were excavated last year and experienced some dramatic settling in the time since. With the ground as soft as it is, we cause more damage than we want if we ask for deliveries of sand, gravel, or dirt during this time of year. Instead, I’ve resorted to using some of the broken down winter manure and mud scraped up in the paddocks to fill one spot that settled. If it works out, there’s plenty more where that came from.
With nature forging ahead every minute without pause, it becomes imperative that we fill our days with activities to keep pace. There is no shortage of work to do to occupy our time. I find myself mentally battling dread that I am neglecting things here when I have a low energy day, finding myself short of motivation to take on the next task. It gets compounded when I consider that I also want to take personal time for getting miles on the bike and playing the guitar; two hobbies of several that I used to do when I had spare time for such exploits.
There is consolation in the fact that I enjoy the projects we have underway, and receive deep satisfaction from the improvements we achieve. It may be a false impression, but I think there should be less demands on our time in the long run, after we accomplish all the projects of shaping the land, installing fencing, and constructing rooms and sheds. In fact, we have more behind us than remains in front of us, with regard to those issues.
We are close enough to reaching a point of only needing to manage day-to-day operations such that I’m feeling hope it is within reach. It may be another year or two, but that’s not all that long in the span of a lifetime. In addition, it’s not something that just happens in an instant, so the work that fills our days now will subtly transition over time, becoming more routine and efficient, and thus, less all-encompassing.
Or, so I can try to convince myself.
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Saying Goodbye
Mozyr has left the building. Last night Cyndie and I returned Moz to the Feline Rescue center where he first caught our attention. Mozyr initially impressed us with his athletic abilities, but from the time he arrived at our home, he proved to be a particularly timid fellow. For the longest time, under the bed was his favored place to recline.
In the end, Cyndie and I realized that he was not suited for the stress of moving outside to become a barn cat. He will do much better someplace where he can be the only pet, in a quiet home, which is just the opposite of the environment we have here at Wintervale.
I believe he was aware that we would be parting company. After we closed off his access to our bedroom, he became like a satellite to me everywhere else that I went in the house, weaving in and out and around and around my legs; hopping into my lap, or the sink again, as I stood at the bathroom mirror. I received more attention from him in the last two days than he had given me in months.
It was cute, but it didn’t change the difficulty he had with people coming and going, or Delilah’s rambunctious curiosity and the daily clamor of life in our house. He was too frequently on alert, behaving as if he was on the edge of peril. It was beginning to take a toll on his health, and he developed that pattern of peeing inappropriately around the house.
We are sad to see him go, but satisfied that he stands a better chance in a different situation. It is a relief to be able to open our bedroom door again, and get rid of the gate we have been tripping over to keep Delilah out of the cat spaces. Pequenita doesn’t need a gate to control Delilah. She has been doing a heroic job of practicing that for a long time. It is our hope that those two will now settle into a more congenial one-on-one relationship.
So, goodbye, Mozyr. May you find someplace you feel safe enough to thrive and romp and unleash your impressive athletic maneuvering, while sharing your friendly, companionable self with one special person who loves you. You are a special cat.
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Construction Complete
We are pleased and excited to have accomplished changes to the basement of our house that we have envisioned since we first arrived. I talked frequently with family and friends about the idea of ripping out the corner entertainment center and building a larger storage room with a door, fishing for insight on what might be involved and whether it was something I could do myself. Then our window upstairs fractured.
That was the catalyst that initiated my search for someone in our vicinity who could do home construction projects. The job to replace the window was such a minor project that it wasn’t all that attractive to a builder, but when I threw in the possibility of also building a storage room downstairs, I found someone to take the bait. It was a perfect match.
Dodge Construction is one semi-retired Randy Dodge, who lives nearby and has built many homes. I was pointed to Randy by the local Andersen Window dealer, who gave the builder a stellar recommendation —believable because Randy built the dealer’s house. On top of having a career’s worth of skills, Randy happens to be a great guy. We agreed on a verbal definition of the project and locked in the deal with a handshake. Logic would dictate that is not a safe way to do business, but my instincts indicated there was little risk in this case.
Randy and his frequent accomplice, Isaac, knocked out the project with relative ease, repeatedly revealing tools and skills that made me exceedingly grateful to have not tried to do this myself. Plus, they designed on the fly, leading to improvements and enhancements that were well beyond my ability to conceive.
While we had them here, we asked if they might finish two rough openings that remained to our sunroom, where we had pulled out windows when we first moved in.
Randy took one look at that and suggested we consider a Formica surface across the bottom. He said he would look for something that might work. I was shocked to see that he brought us a section of counter top that was amazingly similar to our kitchen granite counters, relying solely on his memory. The finished product looks fabulous.
So, we have a new window, newly finished pass-through openings to the sunroom, and a completely finished storage room of built-in shelves in the basement. It is time to begin cleaning up sawdust, sheetrock dust, and putting things back into storage. This time, on shelves!
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Drippy Day
Sunshine had the snow melting off our rooftops in dramatic fashion yesterday. I started a project to assemble a new trailer for our ATV outside of the shop garage, but partway through, I noticed that the snow overhanging the roof had gotten so large it looked scary.
I moved further away from the overhang, out of harms way. At the time, the whole front section of the driveway was dry, but about midway through the assembly instructions my work space was becoming a series of draining water paths.
There weren’t as many collapses from overhead as I expected, but the afternoon was peppered with just enough dislodged masses of melting snow to keep me on edge.
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Delilah and the horses, I can report that Cyndie came in after feeding them in the morning, shortly after I had hit the “Publish” button, and she told me that somehow one of the horses sent the dog tumbling a couple of rolls through the snow.
She said Delilah got up with just a hint of a limp and carried on, leaving a bit more space between herself and the horses.
The horses were wary in the afternoon about coming up to feed under the overhang, so I suspect they have been enduring their own share of startling crashes of snow melt.
Everybody is a little out of whack around here. The cats are acting strange, but in a good way, making many more demands for attention than usual. I think they are starting to shed, and just want us to give them a good brushing. I was petting Pequenita and ended up with my hand and shirt covered in statically clinging cat hair.
I noticed the wee cat smelling Delilah’s paws just after the dog walked in the door from outside. Our cats don’t get to go outside, and I think she was curious about the scent from the great beyond.
Right now, that scent probably just smells like wet feet, but if the melt keeps up like this for long, very soon those paws will be smelling like spring mud.
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Different Cat
When we first saw Mozyr at the feline adoption center, he was demonstrating some amazing athleticism and intelligence in his play. He also gave me the impression he had good confidence in himself. That all seemed to change when we got him home. His preferred spot for a long while was as far under our bed as he could get, up against the wall. Meanwhile, Pequenita, who is half his size, proved to be as bold as he was shy.
For all I know, she contributed to his apparent loss of confidence. There was a brief spell when she seemed to take control of him, banishing him from the bedroom altogether. At the same time, he would bully her off the food, so it seemed like there was an exchange of the dominance roles going on.
He was skittish about receiving affection, and resisted being picked up. He behaved very shy around visiting family and friends. I found myself referring to him as being a chicken, and had begun to think he was just going to be a distant cat that tolerates people as a necessary evil in order to get fed morning and night and have his litter box cleaned.
After a long period of these behavior patterns, he surprised me with a change, suddenly deciding to show up in the bathroom during my evening routines. He would often jump up beside the sink to check out what I was up to, and several times he even laid down right in the sink I was trying to use. He seemed to be indicating that I was his choice for a buddy, but it stayed entirely on his terms. If I tried to pick him up, or give him attention at a time of my choosing, I got rebuffed.
That all went away these last few months, when he seemed to get out of sorts around the time we had company, and then throughout a couple of his recent illnesses. He gave us a scare last Wednesday, when he appeared to be really sick. A quick online search turned up several instances where his symptoms were listed as having potential to be serious, but also could be something simple that a cat can get over in a day. We are lucky that it appears to have been the latter.
We made it very clear that we were trying to help him, and he seemed to respond overnight. He continues to seem better everyday and not only is more like his old self, he is that and beyond. He is a changed cat, as if this illness did something to him. I’ve never had him sit in my lap before.
Yesterday, as I was reading on our couch (and Delilah was outside in her kennel), Mozyr showed up –that in itself being a rare occurrence lately– and proceeded to lay on the book in my lap –an unprecedented occurrence! These last two days, he has met my gestures of attention with greater acceptance than he has ever shown before. I pulled the book out from under him and continued to read. He laid in my lap so long that I decided I should get a picture.
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Never assume your pets won’t change their behavior toward you, especially if you base that assumption simply on how they have behaved with you for the year prior.
Change happens.
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Mission Creep
Initially, it was only supposed to be gutters for the back side of the barn, but when the company showed up to quote that project, they noticed the gutters on our house. I have had an inkling that there was something wrong with our gutters since last year. They were more than happy to point out the shortcomings. It was a bad design that didn’t last, installed poorly by a questionable company that also didn’t last, so we were told.
I didn’t feel the need to check his facts, because I could see that water dripped from places that didn’t make sense to me. Something wasn’t working right, so we told them to include the house in their quote for new gutters. Mark this down as another home maintenance thing that we didn’t have on our to-do list, and don’t really have the budget to afford at this time.
It’s never stopped us before.
We accepted their quote and authorized the work, which got scheduled weeks out, into late November. They finished the barn in a single day while we were both away at work. When I got home that day, I noticed tracks in the gravel and wondered who the heck had been driving around our barn. I completely missed the new gutter hanging overhead. I think it was because they did such a fine job that it looked like it had always been there and never caught my eye.
After the day they expected to start had passed, I called the company to check on the status, still clueless that they had completed the barn. That was embarrassing. The scheduler was describing the plan for the house, which was fine, but I was wondering about the barn, too.
“We already finished that,” I was told.
Oh.
Anyway, then winter weather arrived, causing the house project to be delayed. I figured that meant until spring, but I have already written here about their plan to work on it regardless the snow and ice. That may be a good thing, I don’t know. I’m sure hoping so at this point, because when they came to uncover the old gutters, they discovered other problems occurring from the ice buildup and suggested one big contributor to the problem was that the venting in our soffits was insufficient.
The project expanded to having them pull the wood to open the soffits for increased ventilation, and then refinishing it with metal fascia and soffits that match the new gutters. How are we going to afford that? Their no-interest, no-payment financing plan, that’s how. Looks like our savings for the next year won’t be going toward an exotic vacation. They’ll be socked away to pay for our new and improved gutters and soffits.
I sure hope the payments don’t end up being due at the same time we will need to pay for the fractured window replacement and the new storage room about to be built downstairs. Something tells me we should be real careful about allowing any mission creep to occur when that builder arrives to do his work.
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Making Room
When the weather is nasty cold outside, and hours of daylight are short, one way to deal with it is to work on indoor projects. We have a project waiting for us in our basement that is finally seeing some progress. Interestingly, that progress came as a result of the fracturing of the triangular window beside our stone chimney.
In order to raise the level of interest for a builder to travel to our home to replace the broken window, we tossed in the construction of a storage room in our basement as added incentive. It worked. The replacement window is now on order and when it comes, the builder expects to be available to work on creating a walk-in storage room with built-in shelves in the space where the entertainment center once was.
When we moved in, I did some initial demolition in that corner, taking out the shelving to open up the angled space as much as possible for temporary storage. The only parts left were studs with drywall attached to them. Cyndie masterfully stowed a roomful of stuff into the small space of that corner and then hung curtains across the front to cover the cut-out spaces once filled by a television and speakers.
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In preparation of the builder taking down the studs and putting up new walls to make a more functional storage space, I pulled off the drywall and removed all the screws from the studs. Friday night, Cyndie and I removed all the stuff that was stacked behind that wall and piled it up around the basement. It is a real optical illusion of space to see that little corner empty, but the contents now appearing to consume the entire rest of the room.
We need to rearrange things now to create a clear working space for the builder, with a path for him to bring in materials, and then we will be ready when that window shows up and our project reaches the top in his queue of work.
That done, I guess it’s time to go back outside and play in the snow! How nasty can it really be out there?
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Is It?
Yesterday at work, I was describing the effort that was required over the weekend to clear snow from the entirety of our driveways, walk ways, and deck at Wintervale.
“Is it worth it?” the employee asked.
It didn’t take any time at all for me to switch from whining about all the work our enterprise demands of us, to the immediate acknowledgement, “Yes, it is absolutely worth it.”
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely have moments of wondering how we got ourselves into this situation. More often than not, we are in over our heads with issues that exceed our knowledge and abilities. But hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we would have waited until we knew how to do everything we have accomplished thus far, we’d still be sitting in the suburbs, staring out the window at the side of our neighbor’s garage wall.
On Sunday, Cyndie took this picture of me enjoying one of the views we have earned from our move to the country.
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Bravest Cat
It seems as though a pattern is being revealed to us where we start talking about reaching the limits of our patience with trying to make progress normalizing relations between our cats and dog, and then they suddenly make big gains toward the goal. In the last few days, Delilah and Pequenita have been working diligently to practice co-existing peacefully.
While Mozyr has lagged behind in the bedroom, the two females have been spending a lot of time fraternizing out in the main room. We are leaving a gate up, blocking the hallway to our bedroom now, and Delilah often waits by that gate for Pequenita to venture out. That little cat is being the brave one and stepping out in plain view, even as the dog winds up with excitement over the mere sight of her.
Occasionally, Delilah is able to play it cool long enough that it appears we’ve reach a new drama-free mutual acceptance between them. It offers us rewarding glimpses of what it might possibly be like someday. Pequenita will walk right under Delilah and stroll about calmly and slowly, while Delilah peers down at her with a look of surprised disbelief.
It is almost too funny to watch Delilah struggle to control herself, and eventually her wagging tail gets so much momentum that it swings the front of her body into action, springing back and forth in attempt to get the cat to play. It looks as though, if she thought she could get away with it, Delilah would snatch the little kitty up like a chew toy and run around squeaking her.
When the energy gets to be too much, Pequenita pins her ears back, turns sideways, and in no uncertain terms hisses a powerful message that backs Delilah off. The cat also practices a mean swing that has already taught Delilah to be quick to back away when she is bouncing around in hopes of some play.
When it gets too overwhelming for Pequenita, she just sprints back behind the gate for a while. After the dog has calmed down again, ‘Nita will return and try the exercise another time. We are surprised at how quickly she has been returning. It is often enough that it seems evident that it is an intentional experiment toward achieving normalization.
We couldn’t ask for anything more from Pequenita. She is truly one cool, brave cat.
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Relative Something 