Posts Tagged ‘cold’
Rinse, Repeat
February is beginning to feel like a lot of the same thing over and over again for me. It’s all good, so I don’t want to complain, but I’m finding myself increasingly thinking that a little more variety in the weather would be nice. I need to be careful what I wish for, or I could end up facing the kind of epic weather that Boston has been enduring.
To keep things interesting, I have taken to purposefully trying to widen the trails Delilah and I walk everyday, by tromping down the edges on each side so it becomes about 3-times wider than just a single person walking footpath. Most places that is pretty simple to do, but out in the open the trail keeps getting obliterated by drifting snow. It’s like starting over each time when I run into drifts, and it packs down on top of the previous path, so the trail gets higher and higher instead of deeper. If you step too close to the edge, it becomes a dramatic drop through all the unpacked snow to a level much below the packed trail.
Delilah doesn’t like to walk in the drifts, so when we come to them she will move over to a nearby ridge and trot along easily as I bullheadedly try to forge my way straight through the deepest part. I’m sure we make quite a sight.
The later sunsets are becoming very noticeable now and even though it is still very cold, the added light seems to be enticing the animals toward shedding already. Information about Delilah’s breed, Belgian Tervuren Shepherd, suggests she should be brushed weekly, which I don’t come close to achieving. We prefer brushing her outdoors because it creates a blizzard of dog hair, but it isn’t much fun in the extreme cold.
I tried to do just a small bit inside, grabbing hair off the brush at every stroke, but soon the air flowing through our heat vents was carrying stray hairs aloft in spectacular numbers. One of those comical disasters.
Can you see Legacy’s breath in the cold air?
Unlike this picture, the horses are currently wearing their blankets. I think Legacy’s blanket is really bugging him. I keep spotting him trying to scratch his itches and he hooks the blanket on everything possible, making it look like he is trying to rip it off. He rarely tolerates me putting hands on him, but the other day he leaned hard into my hand as I scratched his neck and chin for him. There was plenty of hair floating loose, so I think the horses are on the verge of changing their coats.
Other than issues of shedding, our routine is on repeat from the day before, and the week before that. Walk the dog, feed the horses, clean up after the horses.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
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Sub-Zero Routine
As we stepped out of the barn last night, after our late bed-check of the horses, Cyndie commented about how much she likes that we have been sharing this night trip to the barn. I do, too. Every chore is better when you can split the load.
The past week has produced an uninterrupted string of below-zero temperatures overnight and the forecast indicates this will continue for some time. The cold gets compounded by some very windy periods which have created dangerous wind chills. To be safe, it has become routine to bring the horses inside the barn overnight.
We let them out during the day so they can soak up the sunshine and move around to their hearts content. This also gives me space and time to clean the stalls. At sunset, they come up for their dinner feeding, which is when I have been moving them back inside.
Somewhere around 9 p.m., Cyndie or I take Delilah out for her last walk of the night. Lately, we have both been going, because we also make a special stop at the barn. The horses stay warm by burning calories and need to have enough hay to keep their furnaces fueled, so during this extreme weather we have added a night-time status check.
It feels like such an intrusion to disrupt their quiet dark space at that hour, so I suggested we use our headlamps and leave the overhead lights off for this late-hour visit, to minimize the disturbance. The horses appear to accept this gesture and remain calm and quiet while we go about our business.
Making everything routine helps them to feel comfortable with our presence. With hushed tones we navigate topping off the hay reserves in each stall, each of us grabbing a couple of flakes off a bale and visiting two of the stalls.
Then we turn our attention to their water buckets, adding water as needed and straining out hay debris that they all spill in there. Cayenne is the worst, as she loves to dip her nose in her water when her mouth is full. Her bucket and hay bin become a frozen hay-cicle. Legacy is the neat-nick who barely drops a few stray strands of hay in his.
As quiet as possible, Cyndie slides the stall doors open and steps in to strain out the soggy hay while I fill a spare bucket with water from the frost-proof hydrant. We do a little hand-off of strainer and bucket through the door and she pours it in.
In a way, it is a lot of rigmarole but the horses understand the drill and tolerate us quietly. We tip our headlamps down to keep them out of the horses eyes, so it becomes this tiny circle of light we move around within, amid the larger space of darkness and sleepy equine souls.
In minutes, we leave as quietly as we came. Stepping back out into the frigid night air, we realize that as cold as it is in the barn, it does protect them from the extreme bite that these winter evenings have been dishing out this week. Our new routine is helping all of us cope as well as possible during these sub-zero nights.
My experience dictates that when this pattern finally breaks, the next phase of winter will feel remarkably warm and comfortable to us. We’ll adjust our routine to one that is much more relaxed. The horses will stay outside at night again, and I won’t have to clean their stalls every day. Until that time, we’ll keep making our special night-time excursions to tuck the horses in for the night.
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Winter Dose
We’re getting a full dose of winter now. They call it an Alberta Clipper and boy did it clip through here yesterday. We enjoyed beautiful blustery snow all day, alternating between sailing by horizontally and falling picture-post-card perfect. Then suddenly at a few minutes past 3:00, the snow stopped falling and patches of sunshine peeked between the clouds. The low pressure center was already on its way to Chicago and beyond.
While walking with Delilah in the morning, I captured a selfie that should become my next profile picture. This is my uniform for working outside in dangerous wind-chill temperatures.
Some of the snowflake crystals were captured nicely on my cap, but a few show up as a blur sailing by in the wind. It was still mighty cold when this was taken, but we did climb comfortably above zero for a time in the afternoon. After the sun set, the temperature dropped quickly and the strong gusting wind helped to change things back to an almost painful level.
You learn to do things quickly at these temperatures. There is no benefit in dawdling.
Delilah doesn’t shy away from the cold, but she certainly is easy to persuade when I offer up the option to go back into the house. She stayed outside for a long time in the afternoon, despite the wicked wind, while I was shoveling and then plowing with the Grizzly.
In this image, she is looking toward the horses, who spent most of the day out in the falling snow, with blankets on, pawing and grazing in the back pasture. I presume they were low enough to be out of the direct force of the wind at that spot. They certainly didn’t stray from that location until time came for their usual dinner hour.
Then they ran up to the barn and politely waited for me to get everything set before inviting them into the stalls for the night.
To top off this day of serious winter weather, Cyndie spent about 3-hours driving home through traffic rife with spinouts, accidents and cars in ditches. She was successful in keeping all four of her tires in touch with the ground.
It was a real-deal winter day of the kind that suits the name we gave our place: Wintervale.
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High Standards
We have a thermometer attached to the outside of our bathroom window that is my favorite, primarily due to the large size of the digital display. Unfortunately, it is probably the least accurate indicator of the actual outdoor temperature because it is mounted to a window that is likely much warmer than the air away from the house. Still, it serves the purpose of giving me a reference for comparing readings from other days.
It has been indicating all week that it’s cold outside. Not that I wasn’t already aware. When we get down to double digits below zero, the cool spots around the inside of our log home start to become much more noticeable.
I think this cold spell has zapped some of my zest for accomplishing things. I am growing weary of the 5-minute production to get into my outdoor cold weather uniform every time I need to step out the front door. I think Delilah finds me to be a comical gymnast as I wrestle the Carhartt overalls over my pants and heavy shirt, then try to bend down to get boots on without being able to breathe. After which, my face disappears beneath a neck-warmer pulled up over my nose to just beneath my eyes, and my hat gets pulled down to cover the neck-warmer so that only a thin slit remains from which I can see anything.
By this time, she has politely waited twice as long as she wanted, making my fumbling with getting the chopper mittens on my hands, but under the coat sleeve, a painful exercise in beyond-reasonable-tolerance for her. It’s exhausting, and I’ve been doing it way too many times a day for her this week.
The only real work I have accomplished outside has been the daily cleaning of the horse stalls —my least favorite task. It tortures my perfectionist tendencies and severely taxes my urge to be frugal. We use wood shavings on the floor of their stalls. We buy them by the bale, and I keep wanting to say, ‘these shavings don’t grow on trees,’ but, of course, they do. Still, they require that I make a trip to the store and pay money to get them. I don’t want to be wasteful.
Trying to toss out the manure and urine-soaked shavings without getting any dry, “still perfectly useable” wood shavings becomes a fool’s errand. And yet, that’s what I do.
The other failed proposition is expecting to get every morsel of manure separated from the shavings and scooped up. I have this sense that the horses must experience a certain amount of frustration when they step on the frozen nuggets that I have missed. Every time I think I’m done, and sweep the manure fork across the remaining shavings to spread them out, additional poo-cicles always pop up. There is an unending supply. It is exasperating.
On a positive note, the practice I have been getting this week is allowing me to become more reasonable about the precision I try to achieve, reducing the time I spend laboring to maintain my high standards. That’s important during these extremely cold days, because I’ve been starting out already pooped just getting dressed to go out for the cold-weather work. I could do with some improved efficiency.
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Cold Care
Yesterday, while cleaning the horse stalls for the second time in two days, it occurred to me that keeping the horses indoors overnight creates a situation a lot like taking care of 4 very large bed wetters.
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It’s a lot of work to give them clean accommodations every single night. I’ve been spoiled by not needing to change their bedding when they stay outdoors, which is most of the time.
The last couple of days I’ve been bringing them inside at dinner time, and then before we go to bed, we walk down to the barn with Delilah to make sure they have enough hay and water for the night.
Even though it was starting to get pretty windy and the temperature had dropped below zero outside last night, the unheated barn felt pretty comfortable in comparison. It’s a nice thing to have this option for the horses.
On Tuesday morning, before letting them back outside for the day, I went to top off the hay in the slow feeder boxes. I discovered that the metal rods of my custom-welded grids that lay on top of the hay were so cold that things were sticking to them. I wondered if the horses were having problems with that. I sure wouldn’t want to put my tongue on that metal at these temperatures.
I decided to remove the grids for the coldest days, and let them have full access to the hay. Horses burn more calories to stay warm, so they need as much hay as they can get right now, anyway.
Pretty much like they did last winter, our horses seem to be dealing with the current extreme cold snap just fine. Their whiskers get a bit frosty, but other than that, they haven’t shown any negative effects from the frigid temperatures.
That’s more than I can say for Delilah. The pads of her feet bother her whenever it gets below zero. Despite that, she has continued to be exceptionally patient with me when I am working with the horses.
Here she is, politely waiting for me to finish so I can take her for an abbreviated below-zero walk.
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Working Again
She did it! Cyndie made it back to work yesterday. A person can believe that they have made good progress with recovery and rehabilitation, but finally going through the motions of getting up early, showering and dressing, and then driving to work in time for a meeting, …that is an ultimate way to test your progress. It’s not for sissies.
With Cyndie out of the house, it was time for me to reclaim my former Wintervale weekday routine. It’s not all that different from the days that Cyndie has been home, except one less distraction. She’s not around.
With our current cold snap, my attention was primarily focused on caring for the horses. They had been in the barn overnight, so my task was to move them back outside and then clean out the stalls behind them. It’s not rocket science, but at -10° F, everything seems to involve an added challenge, especially when it comes to their buckets of water.
The days are short, and in a blink it becomes time to bring them back inside again. Luckily, they make it a pretty simple process due to their interest in getting out of the cold and into their cozy stalls stocked with provisions. That allows me to get back to the house where Delilah and Pequenita are demanding attention.
Cyndie snapped a photo of me last night, working diligently to tend to ‘Nita’s needs. I had to lie still with my legs stretched out for as long as she required.
It’s tough work, but I gotta earn my keep around here, so I soldier on.
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Cold Morn
It was warm yesterday in that relative way that 32° F feels on a January day in our region. That makes this morning’s well below zero wind chill feel so bitterly bone chilling harsh.
Last night Cyndie and I were comfortably lounging by the fire when our daughter, Elysa, phoned to report she and Anne were coming to spend the night. If they hadn’t driven through the blowing snow, we wouldn’t have noticed how nasty the weather had turned until we were ready for bed and giving Delilah one last chance to pee for the night.
Their arrival and report of blowing snow alerted us to conditions we’d rather not make the horses endure. It is a good thing we didn’t neglect them. By the time we got out to ready the stalls and bring in the horses, they were already wet with blown snow and Cayenne was shivering as the temperature plummeted.
This morning in the barn the horses were warm and dry, allowing Cyndie to cover them in their newly washed blankets and let them out for some exercise in the daylight. They will definitely be back in the barn tonight for the even more extreme drop into the negative temperature numbers.
It is hard to determine how much snow fell, because there has been so much wind. The snowplows were out clearing the roads of drifts, but I don’t need to do much work on the deck. All we have is a small mountain range that drifted up to the back door. The rest of the wood has been blown clean and dry.
Clean, dry, and COLD!
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House Sitter
In the calm snowy sunshine blessing us after the busy Christmas schedule, Cyndie and I walked down to the labyrinth to see if she could navigate the course. She handled the exercise pretty well, despite slipping once when she inadvertently stepped on a stray rock.
I gave her a good head start before entering myself, side-stepping my way along the route to move enough snow for a clear path to appear. We didn’t make it all the way to the center before getting interrupted by the arrival of an expected guest.
We had an appointment to meet a man who provides house-sitting services with animal care included. Andy visited with us for a while, appeared to receive Delilah’s approval, and seemed completely comfortable with our horses. We’ve invited him to cover for us for a few days this week, to see how things go when we’re not around.
We were thinking about going up to the lake place for New Year’s Day, but circumstances changed people’s plans and we would be the only family members up there, so we are considering other options. We may make it an in-town vacation and spend a couple of nights at Cyndie’s parent’s house.
There are several chores that we hope to get taken care of first, particularly a plan to take the horse’s blankets to a laundromat that has giant washers. We finally felt the need to use the blankets during one of the recent above-freezing precipitation events. The two geldings seemed to feel a need to paint the blankets with wet lime screenings. It made a real mess.
I tried laying the blankets out to brush them off as much as possible before putting them in a machine, but it didn’t seem like I accomplished much. We are getting some below-zero overnight temperatures today and tomorrow, so we are a little late in having the blankets available if the horses appear to need them.
I’m hoping they took advantage of the hay in the slow-feeder boxes under the barn overhang and stayed sheltered all last night to stave off the worst of the deep-freeze. I worry more about them needing blankets when it is wet. Below-zero temperatures can feel cold, but they are hardly ever wet.
I hope they do fine, because I would prefer that our new house-sitter not need to bother with managing the nuisance that is blankets.
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Almost Frozen
Spring has yet to deliver a truly warm day. Just the opposite, in fact, as we are getting some very cold mornings the last two days, pert-near down to freezing again. I sure hope the plants that are down in the labyrinth won’t be harmed.
I have mowed the labyrinth one time since the snow disappeared. The growth between the paths is already tall enough to cover some of the rocks, giving it a very green look.
The next area that is in desperate need of mowing is the hill below the house, which I think of as our back yard. It has turned into a patchwork of spots that include grass growing fast and tall, contrasted with areas of little-to-no growth at all. In between, there are sections that have little wildflowers growing beside scattered weeds that look like they mean business. It doesn’t look much like a lawn at all right now, and will be well served by a first close-cut of the season.
Won’t happen today. I’m off to Rich’s for a day of biking, followed by a barbecue. There is so much work to be done on the ranch right now that the only way to get myself to do some cycling in preparation for the Tour of Minnesota ride in the middle of June is by making a commitment to join friends in some location far away from home.
Today’s ride is expected to enjoy some sun and nicer weather, which is a welcome change from two weeks ago, when the gathering was initially scheduled to occur. I’ll take it. It will give the paddocks another day of drying while I’m away, helping decrease the amount of mud to be dealt with when I get back in there to do some much-needed cleanup.
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Rescue Effort
It is just a little cold here this morning. Minus 21°F on the thermometer, don’t know what the wind chill is. It actually looks pretty calm outside, compared to yesterday afternoon when we were experiencing some intense gusts and a heavy, steady wind. It created frequent mini-tornadoes of snow.
We stayed up later than usual last night to take in the Grammy Awards broadcast. For some reason, Delilah decided to wake us up earlier than usual. Nothing like a bad night’s sleep to make you feel less than your best self in the morning. On top of that, I spent the afternoon clearing snow –which felt like a bit of a doomed task with the wind beginning to blow and fill in everything I had just plowed– and once again I got the ATV stuck, which required extra shoveling effort to dig out, so most of the muscles and joints of my body are in ‘complain mode.’
Growing old is not for sissies. If it’s this tough for me now, what’s it going to be like when I get old?
At one point yesterday, when we were lounging around the warmth of the fireplace before I ventured outside to work, from my perch on the couch I spotted Delilah fix her gaze on some prize up the spiral staircase. It must be a cat, I thought, and off she went, seeking closer inspection. She seems to desperately want to make contact, probably as much as the cats would fervently prefer to have her not. As she headed up, I tried alerting Cyndie, who had disappeared into the basement in search of a cookbook, and I pondered aloud whether it was Pequenita or Mozyr up in the loft.
As the scrambling and hissing commenced up there, I spotted Pequenita emerge from the safe zone of our bedroom and start up the stairs. That meant it was Mozyr who Delilah was engaged with and had cornered up there.
Mozyr has been behaving more and more like his old self recently. On days last week when I was working, and Delilah would be out in the kennel, both cats were taking advantage of the dog’s absence when I got home, wandering around the house and snitching some dog food from her bowl. Mozyr has become our bathroom pal again, hopping up by the sink, and sitting on the edge of the bathtub when I shower. I take it as a good sign that he chose to venture out from the confines of the bedroom and climb the stairs to the loft when Delilah was around. It gave him a chance to act out toward her and express how he feels about having a dog sibling forced upon his world.
When the commotion settled down and we were able to bring Delilah back down the stairs, it occurred to me that Pequenita’s behavior could be interpreted as coming to Mozyr’s rescue. When she heard the confrontation, she came running and put herself in harms way by diverting Delilah’s attention, smartly doing so with a convenient escape route back to safety. In fact, that helped our effort to convince Delilah to leave Mozyr alone and come back down with us, as Pequenita sprinted her way down and to the other side of the gate.
The brave cat to the rescue, once again, and Moz seems no worse for the wear.
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Relative Something 