Posts Tagged ‘dog’
Mole Caught
Yesterday, Cyndie reported that they had crossed the Arctic Circle. It looks like they are having a fabulous time. Life at home is much less spectacular, but I’ve no complaint with that.
Asher appears to understand that I am being much stricter about keeping him in my line of sight. This has reduced the amount of work I can accomplish in a day, but it has given me more time to catch World Cup matches. They have reached the third and final game in each group, so now the four teams in each group play their two games at the same time. That splits my attention across two screens at once.
It beats working hard out in the hot sun.
For having had three vaccination shots all at once on Tuesday, the horses showed no signs of discomfort yesterday. Our log guy, Matthew, brought his young son to work, so I had fun showing off things I thought would entertain him. He was particularly fascinated with the labyrinth. After walking it with him, he was determined to have his dad come walk it, too. Matthew was power washing the siding of the shop/garage, so he couldn’t do it at the time.
His son asked if he could walk Asher down to the labyrinth to wait. That was fine with me, but then I decided to tag along at a distance in case Asher looked like he was going to run off. By the time I arrived, Asher had pounced on one of those many critter tunnels and come up with a mole in his mouth. Matthew’s son and I then ran to keep up with Asher as he sought the perfect spot to bury his catch.
At least he didn’t do any digging in the compost staging area this time. He ended up picking a location beside the driveway, very near the shop/garage. It’s a trick to monitor this because it seems like he gets hesitant if we get too close, so we tried to hang back as much as possible without letting him get too far away from us.
Thank goodness there will be one less mole making a mess of the labyrinth. Good dog, Asher!
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Good Samaritan
After driving up and down 650th Street, I turned onto a gravel field road to search along the edge of the woods just north of our property. Asher had disappeared on me again. We have tracking tags, but they are currently on Cyndie’s and Elysa’s luggage in Norway.
Thankfully, Cyndie had the forethought to write my phone number on the blaze orange neck bandana that we make him wear to help us see him. While searching for a missing dog, it made sense to answer the call from an unknown number.
The very cheery voice said that she had stopped for a dog in the road, and he jumped right into her car. That’s our Asher. When it comes to cars, Asher has no sense of the concept of stranger danger. He sees every vehicle as his favorite place to be.
She told me that he was on County Road N. That was a new one, in terms of distance away from home, and a real red flag. That road has a 55 mph speed limit, which makes it a very unsafe place for him to be.
I told her I would meet her at the intersection with 650th. Couldn’t thank her enough. She said he is a very friendly dog.
Well, sure. She let him get into her car. Instant BFF.
I immediately revoked his privilege of roaming freely. When I become engaged in an activity, he gets confined to a leash. If we go for a walk off-leash, he has to stay close to me at all times.
To all the good Samaritans who stop and rescue stray dogs wandering on roads, I say thank you. It would have been so easy for her to just keep going, and I had no clue he might choose to go that far. That woman created a good outcome with her care and concern.
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Elysa’s Birthday
Today is Elysa’s birthday, and Cyndie and Elysa are celebrating on a Norwegian cruise boat that will take them up into the Arctic Circle to experience the midnight sun.
After their cruise, they will make their way to Oslo and spend a few days visiting with Friswold relations.
Asher and I have survived our first weekend on our own, with one week to go until I drive to the airport to pick up our Norwegian adventurers. So far, so good. He’s only disappeared on me 3 or 4 times and got himself on the wrong side of the fence of the neighboring property once.
Ella, who stopped by to feed the animals when I was in Cambridge on Saturday, told me that she walks him on a leash to avoid the risk of losing him. I can fully understand why she would choose to do that.
After I retrieved him from one of his unauthorized jaunts yesterday, I convinced him to help me process the latest compost pile that finished cooking.
I was wheeling loads down to the staging space by the labyrinth, and Asher would muster the effort to get up and follow me. The second time we were making the trek, a rabbit hopped into view, and Asher came to life with a sprint that took him out of sight into the woods one more time.
Having now grown accustomed to losing him, I didn’t fret over it. When I got back to the compost area with the emptied wheelbarrow, Asher was already there, waiting for me to return.
Over by the strawberry patch, there was a clue waiting for me to see that I’m not staying ahead of the squirrels, birds, and probably rabbits that think the juicy red fruit is growing there just for them.
The stump of a tree had quite a few of the discarded green leafy crowns of the berries scattered all over it, in addition to two bright red pieces of fruit. I guess the critters are not trying to hide evidence of their activities. Seeing that emphasized to me that I need to be picking berries before they get to them.
Unfortunately, I found very few worth keeping. If the squirrels weren’t taking them, some slug-looking insect was burrowing into many of the rest. I find mowing grass to be a much more dependable endeavor than trying to grow fruits and vegetables.
I’m thinking about celebrating Elysa’s birthday today by treating myself to some ice cream in the middle of the afternoon. Since they are 7 hours ahead in Norway, it will be like I’m joining them for an after-dinner dessert.
I won’t be putting any fresh strawberries on top.
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Buried Where?
Asher has been getting a lot of mentions lately, but I can’t skip telling this story just because I’ve already written about him so many other times. I think he pulled a fast one on us.
At the start of our walk yesterday morning, he suddenly took off in a sprint into the woods and grabbed some critter before we knew what was happening. I didn’t get a good look, but my best guess is that it was probably a young raccoon. Asher quickly ran out of sight with the limp body hanging in his mouth, ostensibly to bury it, per his natural inclination.
We hustled through the woods after him, but gave up without finding him and started making our way toward the barn to feed the horses. Then I spotted his orange scarf on the compost pile by the labyrinth. He was pushing the dirt with his nose and packing it securely.
That showed us where his catch was buried. We made a plan to come back later, without him, and dig it up to dispose of the body in the trash.
Cyndie had the first crack at it and came up empty. She asked me to check. I went through the whole pile and found nothing. It didn’t make any sense.
Why did we see him covering up something there, but found nothing when we checked a short time later? Cyndie said there was no evidence that the dirt had been disturbed after we watched Asher pack it down with his nose.
Was he putting on a show for us to make us think that’s where he buried it? That really seems like a stretch.
For the record, we have seen Asher bury a lot of bones and creatures he has captured over the years, but we have never seen him dig them up later. I once happened upon a bone that he had buried and offered it up to him like it was a prize. He immediately carried it away and re-buried it.
I don’t know what he did with his trophy, and at this point, I don’t want to know. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Asher has instincts and knowledge of things to which I am entirely oblivious.
As long as he stays on our property and behaves respectfully with friends and visitors who stop by –sometimes with their own pets– I am comfortable giving him freedom to be a dog and do dog things without me entirely comprehending.
He will always have an edge over me, given that canine ability to pick up scents umpteen thousand times better than we can.
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Message Received
Asher was scratching to get at something underneath one of the dressers in our bedroom. I quickly told him I would help, hoping it would get him to immediately stop scratching. Unsure about what he was after under there, I got down on my knees and pressed my face to the floor.
I didn’t see anything and told him so, as if he would understand my words more than just hearing, “blah blah blah blabbering blah.”
Suddenly, his favorite bright orange “Tricky Treat” ball smacked down beside my head. Asher had picked it up and tossed it at me.
“Aha!” Message received.
I looked under the dresser again. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it was obvious. One of his morsels of the dry food we put inside the ball was lying just out of his reach under there.
While I was writing this out just now, Asher showed up and dropped his Tricky Treat ball on my arm. It’s not clear whether that was a way to let me know he knew what I was writing about, or that he just wanted more treats.
Either way, he is making it very clear that he has not given up on training us to recognize what he wants to communicate.
He is trying to disprove the canine adage that you can’t teach old owners new tricks.
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Asher’s Activity
While Cyndie was away yesterday, I was in charge of Asher and hoped he would linger nearby while I was puttering about with whatever activity grabbed my attention. I thought he was with me when I headed down to the barn to retrieve the feed buckets after the morning feeding. He often lies down just beyond the front of the barn when we are working inside.
I ended up back in the compost area and decided to dig into the currently active block to turn it over and break it apart to aerate and reshape it back inside the pallets again. That ended up taking enough time that I felt a need to check on Asher, since he never showed up where I was working.
Well, he was nowhere in sight. I walked toward the house and down the driveway again to the road, but he was nowhere to be found. Fearing he may have taken off down the road, I got in my car and cruised up and down to the neighboring properties. Still nothing.
However, as I drove back toward the garage, I found Asher trotting toward me from the direction of our woods, looking happy as could be and a little tired. I parked the car and convinced him to join me in the compost area, where he settled down to nap in the shade as I worked.
He surprised me after a while by moving out into the sun.
With his black coat, it looked pretty hot to me, but who am I to question his choices?
My impression was proven accurate just a few minutes later when he got up and walked into the weeds to lie down in the shade.
When I had finished moving the compost pile, Asher followed me up to the house, where he found another shady spot to lie and keep an eye on me while I mowed the front yard.
He must have gotten all that disappearing out of his system in the morning because he ended up staying close to where I was working for the rest of the day.
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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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Relative Something 