Posts Tagged ‘chores’
Altered Plan
Okay, I admit it. I spent much of yesterday focused on a plan of what I could accomplish today, instead of living in the moment of the tasks at hand. Admittedly, the majority of yesterday’s activity involved “tractor time,” which naturally provides ample opportunity for a mind to wander.
I was going to distribute composted manure and overturn the piles still cooking. I wanted to power up the trimmer and clean fence lines and drainage ditches.
Today’s weather has given me a chance to rethink those plans. It is raining.
Yesterday, I contemplated the absurdity of how much anguish I was feeling over the difficulty I was having maintaining my cut lines, while people in other parts of the world are living in the middle of wars, unable to get enough to eat.
On the diesel, while chopping weeds in the back pasture, my mind looked ahead to how I could clean the edges of the field with the trimmer.
Now I don’t know what I am going to do. The ground is wet enough that I am hesitant about bringing out the big tractor because it can really make a muddy mess of the ground.
Maybe I’ll split some wood.
Looking at the radar, I’ve got a little more time to think about it before the precipitation clears.
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Mostly Ready
Today I depart for my week of vacation and I believe I am, for the most part, ready. That is, I finished the majority of necessary tasks at work and got my “away message” programmed in my email. I completed the task of mowing all the grass areas that we regularly mow. Most amazing to me, I took care of two tasks that have been successfully neglected for a loooong time.
It may have something to do with the fact that we have Elysa’s celebration planned for the day after I return from my adventure. I won’t have much time to tend to things in the small number of hours after I get home. What I find curious is how particularly easy it was to address both of these issues. It was like changing a light bulb.
Well, one of them was, anyway. Except, the light bulb(s) were high enough to require a tall ladder to reach, and were a unique size which we couldn’t buy until we climbed up to pull one of the burned ones for reference.
The other task was to adjust the hinge on one of our french doors to the deck. That’s not all that hard. I’ve done it before. But it requires a wrench and instructions that were down in the shop. I just kept neglecting to get around to remembering to bring them up to the house.
The real kicker is that the act of fixing the hinge adjustments put me in the mindset to finally also look at the lever mechanism which has been a curious nuisance from the day we moved in. To set the latch on the three doors to the deck, the levers needed to be lifted upward, which is entirely counter-intuitive. Visitors are always baffled by the anomaly, and often fail to successfully set the latch.
Since we plan to have a lot of visitors soon, I felt added incentive to take a crack at solving the riddle. It was a case of the simplest and most obvious possibility being the answer. There was a plastic plug holding the conventional latch retracted in all of the doors. Popping the plug out released the latch that automatically catches when the door is closed. Now when the handle is moved in the more typical direction of down, the doors will open.
It was a huge fix for us. Now it’s done. How much more ready could I now be?
Bring on the trip, and then bring on Elysa’s celebration.
In the mean time, for those of you who haven’t already seen it, I’ll offer the song I wrote about the week of biking and camping which I have participated in for many years around the middle of June…
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Makin’ Chips
One chore I did make good progress on over the weekend was grinding piles of branches into wood chips for our trails and garden.
I had hoped to have Cyndie around to help, but she was tied up with a project in the house while I was at this, so I was on my own. Turned out, she had already done such a great job of preparing the pile of branches, it was easy-peasy feeding the chipper.
It was as if she was helping, just from a different time. We have gotten good at selecting the maximum sized branches, and she did a masterful job of snapping limbs to eliminate wide “Y”s that won’t fit through the feeder.
This chipper was the best decision for us. It is an efficient way to dispose of the endless supply of branches that litter the woods and it produces a product that we have unending use for as a covering for the trails.
I love the results!
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Rebalancing Act
We are checking off a string of spring chores this weekend, and it has given me a chance to replace the rock that months ago toppled from its delicately balanced perch atop another on the tall stump of a pine tree. It’s been on the ground so long that I’ve actually forgotten what it was that contributed to the fall, but I think it was high winds.
I never expect these balancing installations to last, but the two on that topped pine trunk had exceeded my expectations for so long that I was rather surprised when it finally did collapse.
I had the diesel tractor out to use the loader for pressing down a fence post that was being pushed up by the springtime thawing and freezing of the ground. It worked incredibly well for that purpose, by the way, quickly returning the post to the desired level. “Like butta,” as they say.
It won handily over the other method I tried, in two locations where the ground was way too saturated with water to support the weight of the tractor. Pounding the posts with a sledge only moved them a small amount, and required a great deal more effort.
When it came to my rebalancing act, I first tried hefting the fallen rock up the ladder, but that attempt only succeeded in knocking the lower rock to the ground, too. There is no way I can lift that lower rock, so that meant I needed the bucket. In a moment of inspiration, I deviated from the previous orientation and flipped the base rock over this time.
I don’t know if this orientation will last any longer, but I’m liking the new look. That’s what it’s really all about. I like to look at balanced rocks.
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Runaway Chores
The last few times we ran the dishwasher, we found some wetness on the floor in front of it. Most recently, it turned out to be a lot more than just some wetness. We had a leak.
Fearing the worst, I hustled downstairs to check the ceiling. The dishwasher is located above our storage room, which has a finished ceiling. There was a light stain on one of the tiles. Curses!
We have some history with leaking dishwashers. In our previous home back in Eden Prairie, the leak went undetected for a long time, because it was located in the drain hose. Mice had chewed a hole in the plastic hose and the leak was not visible from the kitchen.
My fear was that it had happened again, and I prepared myself for pulling the dishwasher to look behind it. I didn’t really want to tear into that project, so I decided I should make sure the drain wasn’t blocked by debris, first. The only problem with that plan was the fact that I didn’t know how to gain access to the drain.
While I was sitting on the kitchen floor, peering at the inner workings of the dishwasher, I got a close view of the nasty buildup of gunk that had accumulated around the edge of the door and on the gaskets around the door. Could it be?
I gave them a thorough cleaning. While I was on the floor peering under the appliance, I got a scary view of places that never get cleaned. We have a cat, so areas that don’t get cleaned become an incredible mass of cat hair, which then becomes a super absorbent net that catches dog hair.
Cyndie got the small shop-vac for me and I started cleaning under kitchen cabinets. Cat crawl spaces. While I had the vacuum and was lying on the kitchen floor, she suggested I clean under the stove and the refrigerator, too. I couldn’t argue with that logic.
I pulled the drawer from beneath the oven and found enough items to feel like an archeologist discovering an ancient tomb. I had to ask Cyndie whether they were from us or the previous owners. She said it looked like a little of both.
After the stove, I moved on the refrigerator. Again, my first thought was, we own a cat. Those coils should be cleaned about 10-times more often than we are accomplishing. It was nightmarish under there. While I was grunting over that project, Cyndie started giving the oven a heavy dose of scrubbing.
I asked permission to remove some screws so we could get to the space between the windows in the oven door. There was a cobweb in there that has bothered me for a long time. Soon, we had all the kitchen appliances in pieces, and we were cleaning nooks and crannies that have probably never been cleaned before.
Delilah was incredibly patient with us, as we toiled away the entire evening on this runaway series of cleaning chores, though she failed to mask how forlorn she felt over being neglected the whole time.
While we were busy dealing with the mission creep of the oven door and the refrigerator coils, the original problem of a leaking dishwasher appeared to have gone away. After cleaning the gaskets, we put it though a test run while we worked away in the kitchen.
There was no sign of any leaking whatsoever. Problem solved? I will be keeping a skeptical eye on it for the foreseeable future.
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Additional Animals
We are caring for George’s animals this weekend while he is out of town, so we have additional mouths to feed during morning and evening chores. When we planned for this earlier last week, nobody gave much thought to the approaching polar vortex dropping our temperatures below zero.
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By Friday morning, when we stopped over to review procedures with George, it was clear that conditions would be extreme. George warned us about the hydrant in the barn not draining well and being susceptible to freezing. He listed several other options, should that occur.
That helped greatly when the situation arose Saturday morning at about the coldest hour all weekend. The pump handle did not want to move and I didn’t want to force it. We used the 2nd option, and hardly lost a step in getting everyone their morning rations of food and water.
By last night, after 3 visits in 2 days, the animals all seemed to understand what was about to go down when we pulled up again in my car. Dinner was about to be served! You can almost feel the creatures smiling when you present them with precisely what they are longing to have.
The ducks and chickens were particularly anxious about getting a drink of water. Their pans for water are not currently heated, so when their liquid becomes a solid, they have to leave the relative warmth of walls and a roof, and venture outside the barn to one of the troughs that have heaters serving the larger animals. A number of them seemed to prefer waiting until we arrived, based on their eager impatience.
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After tending to all the animals that needed something from us, it was time to add wood to the furnace. At the temperatures we were experiencing, the furnace seemed about as hungry for wood as the animals were for food and water.
There was not much energy being wasted by any of the sheep, horses, chickens or ducks. Everybody was in full conservation mode, huddling up with each other or hunkering down against the bitter bite of Arctic air pressing down from the clear sky.
George, rest assured that no one was left wanting for anything over weekend, and everybody was well-behaved, despite the harsh conditions.
I’m sure your faucet handle will thaw out again by June sometime.
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Weekly Expedition
Thursday evenings is the usual time when we move our garbage and recycling bins down to the road by our mailbox. Our driveway is about a quarter of a mile long, so it can be a feat that requires some preparation.
Early on, I contemplated a variety of options for managing the bins for trash day. Plenty of rural folk permanently keep their bins near the road in a designated location, and then devise ways to haul their trash down.
I don’t want our bins in plain sight all the time, and I definitely don’t want to haul trash the long distance to them.
One of our close neighbors always drives his down in his small pickup truck. I figure it would work okay to haul ours down in a trailer behind the Grizzly, if need be. We have contemplated, off and on, about the driveway becoming gravel in the future, to avoid the expense of new pavement. The bins might not roll so well over gravel.
For now, just we have for the past 3 years, we continue to walk them down every week. It might seem like quite a chore, and I’ll admit there are times when I’m not mentally prepared when that thought occurs to me, but the effort always ends up being a rewarding experience.
I can’t count the number of times when I have felt awe over taking that ‘forced-chore’ walk outside, at a time when I didn’t think I wanted to, because the experience ended up being so beautiful, fulfilling, and inspiring.
That simple action turns into an epic journey.
I have had the opportunity to spend a week learning winter survival skills at Will Steger’s homestead, to travel to see Olympic games in Norway, to hike in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, and to experience a few weeks at Ian Rowcliffe’s Forest Garden Estate in Portugal. I returned from each of those experiences a changed man.
There is something about routinely rolling heavy bins of refuse from our house to the road that changes me, too. Every time. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how to describe it, but I’m pretty sure it is what keeps me from putting any serious energy toward devising a more mechanized method of moving them.
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Accomplishment Burst
After a few days of not doing anything productive, it didn’t take much yesterday to make me feel like I’d salvaged the weekend by accomplishing something beyond just feeling better. It helped that the weather was especially nice, despite starting out rather brisk in the early morning.
By the time I made it out of the house, the chill had been replaced by an increasingly comfortable November breeze. My first goal was to get the truck battery charging. For some reason we have yet to discern, every other time Cyndie uses it, there’s not enough battery to turn it over when we next try.
Logic would indicate she is leaving something on, or maybe not closing a door tight. I don’t know. We have yet to find any clear evidence of what it is, and the fact that it doesn’t happen every time complicates the mystery.
While the truck charged, I headed down to the round pen to help Cyndie rake out and distribute the sand that was added. We got the project down to a manageable-sized remaining pile after spreading an even new depth throughout the whole circle.
On my way in for lunch, I paused at the garage to get the truck started and let it idle while winding up cords and putting away the charger. Then I checked and re-checked to make sure nothing was left on to put any drain on the battery. It better start when we test it again. Cyndie wasn’t anywhere near it when I did all this. 🙂
After lunch, I enlisted Cyndie’s help to tackle a chore I have neglected for over a year. This one means the most to me to have finally resolved.
Almost 2-years ago I had a little accident when trying to get the diesel tractor out of the shop garage to plow snow at a time when a storm had knocked out our power. The garage door did not stay up all the way and the roof of the tractor caught the weather-strip of the door and ripped it down. I saved the moderately bent up aluminum and rubber strip, but had no idea how it could go back on.
I neglected it for the entirety of last winter, studiously shoveling out all the snow that repeatedly blew under the door, instead of looking closer at the weather strip. Honestly, I had pretty much given up caring about the conspicuously absent finishing strip on the bottom of the huge door.
When I was building the last hay box in the barn stalls, I needed a board from my stash up in the rafters of the garage, and that meant I had to move the old weather strip out of the way. I decided to just take it down and lay it in front of the door, to make it easier to reattach than struggle to put back up on the rafters again.
The strategy worked! It took a little creative problem solving, but Cyndie and I figured out how to get the rubber to slide off the aluminum, so we could access the screws. With a few minor steps to add some screws in new locations, we got it reattached and were able to get the rubber back in place. We successfully recycled a part that would have otherwise been tossed.
No snow inside the garage this year!
With that success bolstering my confidence, I hopped on the lawn tractor and mowed the front yard. It struck me that I had been working in a short-sleeved T-shirt all day, and was mowing my lawn like a summer day, on the 8th of November. I’ve dealt with worse working conditions.
After that, I got the horses fed and cleaned up manure, before calling it a day and heading inside.
I think actions speak louder than words to reveal evidence that I am, indeed, feeling much better after several days of rest and Cyndie’s exceptional care.
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Comes Around
Last year, when I was home full-time, I often looked forward to the moment when Cyndie would arrive home from work and cruise up the driveway where she could see the results of my day’s effort on some project or another. Of course, this only worked if she made it home before dark, which is a tough thing to do during the period when the sun sets before 5:00 in the afternoon.
Sadly, more often than not, I would need to prompt for some feedback, and the response tended to reveal that she hadn’t noticed a thing. After the long commute, just reaching the driveway safely becomes the primary milestone of note, which tends to swamp the senses and blur specific details that may have been noteworthy.
Yesterday, after I pulled up the driveway, I did see the horses grazing in the hay-field nearby, but after that, pretty much a blur. I found Delilah waiting on the other side of the door, as I walked into the house, but no Cyndie. After a wonderfully happy greeting from our dog, I watched her move to the doors beside the fireplace which provide a view beyond our deck to the back yard hill that slopes down to the labyrinth garden.
With no leaves on the trees, it was easy to spot Cyndie pushing the reel mower on the path of the labyrinth. Delilah anxiously followed her master’s every move in the distance. That dog really bonds with the person who is home with her all day.
When Cyndie eventually made her way back up to the house, she promptly asked me how the place looked when I pulled in.
Busted.
I hadn’t noticed all the work she had labored to accomplish on her own while I was away. I felt awful to have missed it, and I gained a new appreciation for what it was like for her last year, before our roles became reversed.
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Name Withheld
Among the many things on the always-growing list of tasks we would like to accomplish, there was one that caught our attention before we even owned the place, during one of our early visits with the sellers. It grabbed my attention immediately when I first laid eyes on the barn. There was a bright green shamrock sign on the wall, and the name “Cleary” on the peak of the roof line.
I was so uninformed about Cleary Buildings that I actually asked the seller if they were Irish, thinking they had put their own name on the barn. He seemed embarrassed for me, as he explained that it wasn’t a name from their family.
Since the shamrock and name were both more prominent than Cyndie and I cared for, it became an early item on our list of things to be fixed. The shamrock was within easy reach on a ladder, and I took that down right away.
The name would have to wait. For three years.
I don’t know why some things take that much longer. For a while, I thought about swapping the end cap with one on the shop garage, since that one is all green. Recently, upon closer inspection, I discovered the roof pitch is different between the two structures and the parts were different sizes.
Plan B was to simply paint over it. When I finally took care of the project, it ended up being only a matter of minutes before it was accomplished, which only served to further confound the question of why it took so long to get it done in the first place.
No disrespect intended to the Cleary company. We are happy with their product. At the same time, we are even more happy to have the first impression of the barn come from the structure, itself, in contrast to the overly prominent company name that used to shout from its peak.
.Of course, we might feel a little different about something on the side of the barn if it happened to be the Wintervale Ranch logo…
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Relative Something 