Posts Tagged ‘dog’
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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Painful Dislocation
What a way to wake up. All she did was sit up in bed, and suddenly Cyndie yelped that her jaw had dislocated. We were both dumbfounded. While she whimpered in pain and desperately tried to self-analyze what was going on and how to resolve it, I felt totally incapable of doing anything to help.
I’ve had my jaw pop out of joint before, and it was incredibly painful and scary, but it was only momentary. With no logical trigger for what had occurred to Cyndie, we feared that a correction may be beyond our reach. I wondered if I would be driving her to urgent care, and whether I should try to take care of the dog and horses before going, when Cyndie reported she had managed to get her jaw back into position.
At least that ended her crying over the intense pain. It’s brutal to be the observer when the closest person to you is visibly and audibly suffering in acute pain, and there is little you can do to fix things.
As awful as that is, at least there’s no physical pain involved. No one goes unscathed, though.
After a morning that started like that, the rest of the day is wide open for improvement. Cyndie was able to rally and resume her planned art class in Hudson, and Asher and I carried out our duties, living a life of luxury at home.
As I was getting Asher ready to go out for a walk, I opened the door without looking to let him charge after a squirrel or rabbit or whatever threat he imagined was out there. It was after he took off like a shot that I spotted the delivery truck coming up the driveway.
As fast as I let him run, I was suddenly hollering at him to stop and grappling with the ecollar controller to push the alert button to distract his focus away from the vehicle. He obeyed just barely enough that the driver made it three-quarters of the way and rolled down his window to hand me a package. I grabbed Asher’s collar to keep him in place while the driver turned around to depart.
Later in the day, I was spectacularly successful in convincing Asher to hang out close by while I pushed the mower through the labyrinth for the first cut of the season. Mia wandered out into the back pasture to graze, and Asher made himself comfortable, sprawling out to survey the horizon for anything else that moved.
It feels very rewarding to be able to accomplish the first cut before the growth has gotten too far along. The hardest part of the job is pushing the mower over the raised ridges from the voles that think they own the place.
Cleaning the deck afterwards, I scraped as much dirt as I did grass clippings.
It was a good finish to a day that started out a lot scarier.
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Watchin’ Basketball
I have trouble understanding how basketball referees decide when contact is a foul and when it isn’t. Last night’s four games of the sweet sixteen round of the NCAA Men’s were fun to watch, despite how often players “walk” with the ball and don’t get whistled for it.
Tonight, I will switch back to watching the Women play, since the lady Gophers are still alive in their tournament, having survived to the sweet sixteen for the first time since 2005. Wish us luck against UCLA.
There was a little competition for space in a chair between Asher and Cyndie yesterday. Not all sports were happening in tournaments. Our grand-nephew, Drew, stopped by for a visit from his dorm at UWRF, and that had Asher all excited and seeking nonstop attention.
Cyndie whipped up some Italian Beef sandwiches for dinner and served some fresh-baked goodies for dessert. Her buttery, super-sweet granola cookies were a big hit. I think I may have exceeded my daily sugar ration simply by looking at them. I ate several of them, just to make sure.
It’s a bad time to be consuming excess calories, since I spend a lot less time being active when there are so many March Madness games on TV, grabbing my entertainment attention. This would be a great case for powering the television with a treadmill. Then the only way I could watch would be by exercising.
In the meantime, my body at rest stays at rest.
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Horses Walkabout
Just because something has never gone completely wrong before doesn’t guarantee it won’t happen eventually. Horses have an amazing ability for stealth when they so choose. If one were to leave barn doors unlatched and the alleyway gates unchained while focused on adding a few shovels of lime screenings under the overhang, like Cyndie did last night, who knows what could happen?
Cyndie had taken Asher along in the fading daylight after dinner on a trip to the barn to collect empty feed buckets. I was comfortable on the couch in the loft in my after-shower night clothes when I got a call from her, informing me that the horses had gotten out.
There is no hesitation to be had when receiving a message like this. I slipped my bare feet into boots and stepped out the front door to greet all four horses in the yard, looking rather unsettled. My presence was enough to turn them back toward the direction of the barn, where I could hear Cyndie shouting for Asher, who was darting about as if he couldn’t decide whether to herd them or prance around along with them.
Thankfully, when the horses showed a hint of interest in getting back to their safe space, Cyndie was able to open a gate to the small paddock and usher them through it with gentle encouragement.
It had only taken a few seconds of Cyndie being distracted with her task for the horses to move themselves silently up to the unchained alleyway gates and nose their way through. She spotted them as the last of the four disappeared into the barn. Asher had been out by the hay shed, but came running into the barn through the small front door to see what was up.
They must have passed each other because he popped out under the overhang to let Cyndie know something was totally out of order. The horses apparently went straight out the small front door Asher had just come in, because by the time Cyndie got in there after them, they were gone.
She told me they had headed down the driveway in the opposite direction from the house when she called me. From the high point on the driveway, near our rocking chairs on the lookout spot, Cyndie said the horses turned and sprinted on the asphalt at full speed toward the house.
I’m sorry I missed that. It must have been a raucous clamor of hooves and a spectacular sight.
The rule violation that occurred is having left both small barn doors unlatched at the same time that the alleyway gates were unchained. The inside ones can be optional, but only if the outside doors are all latched.
The odds of one, let alone all four of the horses, choosing to test and immediately pass silently through the unchained gates at a time when both barn doors were also unlatched are very unlikely.
But it could happen. They proved that emphatically last night.
Dog Tired
He did it to me again. That’s two days in a row. Asher took off when I wasn’t looking and disappeared beyond the range (I’m assuming) of my ability to persuade him with the electronic collar. They should have a setting where the collar automatically starts vibrating when your pet gets a certain distance away from the controller.
For some reason, on Sunday, I grabbed the mailbox off its base when plowing the driveway, and I left it in the shop garage. There would be no mail delivery, so I took it off with a plan to replace it after the township plow cleared the road.
As Asher and I headed out for a walk yesterday morning, I took him to the shop garage to get the mailbox. The garage door button is inside the shop, and I stepped inside to close it. When I came out, Asher was nowhere in sight. I thought he had gotten trapped inside the garage when I lowered the door, so I opened it back up.
Nope. He was gone. I grabbed the mailbox and started hustling my way down the driveway when my phone rang. It was our closest neighbor, Eileen, who lives on the other side of 650th St, reporting that Asher was at her place. At least that was closer than a mile down the road, and this time my forced march to retrieve him was all on plowed surfaces. Still, that’s more walking under stress than I wanted to be doing.
On his second walk of the day, Asher was confined to a leash. When we got to the end of the driveway, I discovered the plow had come by a second time and filled the end of the driveway, and also knocked the mailbox into the ditch as it passed. So much for my bright idea the day before.
Under protests from Asher, I tied his leash to the hay shed to give him a grand vista to enjoy while I went to get the Grizzly to clean up the end of the driveway. Unfortunately, the ATV wouldn’t start. I guessed I might have flooded it using the choke to entice it to fire, so I left it to sit and did some shoveling by hand.
First order of business was to clear a path out of the back of the barn so I could dump manure. The mess around the overhang was about to get out of control, and the wheelbarrow was already full because I didn’t have that pathway cleared to dump it.
That should have been enough time for the flooded cylinders to clear, but I still couldn’t get it to fire. That left me carrying a shovel to the end of the driveway to heave scoops of the mess by hand until I had enough of an opening for Cyndie’s car to fit through.
I ended the day exhausted and muscle-sore. And tired of the dog. But a solution to my dog concerns arrived last night when Cyndie successfully returned from Florida. She had tennis shoes on when she walked in the door, and it looked so funny to me.
She will be back in winter boots today!
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Snowstorm Underway
As of this morning, I would say the weather service delivered accurate warnings about this “historic” winter storm. Unfortunately, Asher decided the snow gave him freedom to do whatever he pleased, leading me on a near heart attack march through the deep drifts, following his tracks up 650th St. to convince him to get to the barn, “NOW!”
Not sure if his e-collar was not tight enough or if he had gotten out of range, but it is now much tighter and set to a higher level of getting his attention and cooperation.
Before he disappeared on me, I paused to take a picture of the drift off the roof.
Down the hill in the woods, I saw him stop to poop. After a few steps of trudging through the snow somewhere near where our trail should have been, I looked for his fluorescent orange vest and couldn’t find it. Hustling through the deep snow to find his tracks, I could see he was off on a leaping run and never spied him again until I had huffed and puffed my way across most of our acres to the road. Then it took cresting the hill to the north and spotting him a mile ahead of me. It was so far that I struggled to identify whether he was still moving away from me or coming back.
It took losing sight of him behind a rise in the road to figure it out.
The horses are coping the way horses do. I don’t know if they experience regret, but I hope Mia is cognizant of how hard I was pleading with her to accept a cover before the storm arrived.
Sadly, the wind direction at the start of the snow was from the east and blew right under the overhang. It has switched now, so they at least have that level of relief from the blizzard.
Now I’m headed out to see if I can put a mid-storm dent in the drifts over the driveway with my Yamaha Grizzly 660.
This is one instance when I will have no problem allowing “good enough” to prevail over the usual target of perfection.
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Sounds Matter
Of all the night sounds reverberating throughout our woods –coyotes howling, raccoons arguing, rabbits getting caught– I cherish the conversations of owls more than anything. Last night, I took Asher for an extra walk in the dark because he had patiently slept through the entire length of the documentary, “Cover-Up,” about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
Asher deserved a last bit of exercise before entering his crate for the night. We probably walked right beneath the owl that began loudly revealing his presence after we got back inside the house. I like to think they are using their night vision to supervise the goings on of all the nocturnals around here.
Asher is not particular about where he decides to rest his head. The height of the bottom shelf of the coffee table worked out just fine the other night.
More often than not, he demonstrates that no pillow is required for slumber.
Asher was incredibly patient with being confined to the barn and the limited space under the overhang yesterday, while I worked longer than normal to tidy the grounds of accumulated hay scraps dropped by the mares. We are anticipating a visit from Maddy and the Farrier, Ralph, sometime this morning.
From Florida, Cyndie texted Maddy to share concerns we have about how Mix is doing. I had sent Cyndie a picture of the fence post Mix was biting as if it were an apple.
It’s possible she’s just bored, but her stiff movement and other behaviors might be signaling Mix is dealing with some pain. We are already suspecting she has some arthritis in her joints, and are giving her a daily pain med to treat that.
I don’t see how they can be bored with the ice on Paddock Lake shrinking right before their eyes.
Lost in my own thoughts yesterday, I startled all four of the horses as I was rolling the empty trash bin back from the end of the driveway. They mostly ignore the familiar sound of the plastic wheels rolling on the asphalt, although Mia still always picks her head up to stare as if she’s unsure whether it’s a threat or not.
My normal behavior would be to roll the bin on the pavement beyond the hay shed and then park it there while I walk to the barn to deal with chores. However, my mind was somewhere else when I reached the gravel on the front side of the hay shed and followed Asher toward the barn.
The quiet rolling wheels suddenly changed to a raucous clamor on the gravel that sent the horses scrambling in an emergency response drill. I was so distracted that it was the reaction of the horses that jarred me back to reality, and not the sudden noise the bin was making.
Horses provide plenty of opportunities to help keep us attuned to the present moment. Always remember, sounds matter.
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Pretty Pleased
Traveling from -11°F to +19°F in the hours required to drive home to Wintervale, and from a weekend of too little sleep to a full night’s slumber, has left me feeling dizzy.
I found the landscape at home to be confusingly reduced in snow cover, regardless of the temperature remaining well below the thaw point. Did it all evaporate? The snowfall threat for our county didn’t happen as predicted on Saturday. Cyndie had the horses all blanketed in advance, then needed to remove them first thing the next morning.
I’m not unhappy that it didn’t snow. There was no shoveling required. It was a relief.
Alas, the one who greeted me right inside the door when I got home was Asher, wagging his tail, making sure he saw me before Cyndie did. In short order, it was time for me to commence with my first-of-the-month tasks. The month of March has arrived. Spring is on the way soon. I guess this qualifies as March coming in like a lamb.
I am mentally preparing for Cyndie’s departure in a couple of days for Florida to visit her mom for almost two weeks. That means I will not only be in charge of all the animal caretaking, but I will also become the head cook, as well. That will align well with my new diet. I ate so many cookies and coffeecake she provided for the weekend that I would like to use her absence to return my caloric intake to reasonable levels. I need to offset my recent excess and stem the tide of my expanding middle.
How quickly my mind has jumped out of “vacation” and back into reality mode. Granted, it was only three days, but it felt more like an epic adventure. Partly because it’s been so long since the last time I went fishing, and partly because I have spent very little social time with these schoolmates before.
It was a blast, but fun as it was, I’m feeling pretty pleased to be back home once again.
Just Behave
It’s been a lot of days in a row with temperatures above freezing. I’ve lost count at this point, but there has been enough melting that the labyrinth is now half uncovered.
The melting also finally exposed the dead raccoon that Asher buried in the snow down by the road long ago. Cyndie has been wanting to get rid of it, but was mistaken about its location and couldn’t find it when she brought me down there with a shovel a few weeks back, as things first started to melt.
It’s all bagged up now. When Asher originally caught the raccoon, Cyndie wondered why the critter was out during the middle of the day. I’m wondering why no other roaming predators had taken interest in the carcass when it started to be exposed by the melt. Maybe it was sick, and that’s why nothing was messing with it.
When I walked Asher past that spot with the telltale striped hide peeking through the snow earlier in the day, he was very good about obeying my “LEAVE IT!” command.
He was also very good when we made our way down there again in the high heat of the afternoon and happened upon a neighbor walking her two dogs along the road. We have no confidence about whether Asher will react aggressively with unknown dogs or not, so we do our best to avoid coming into contact with them.
I was able to have a brief long-distance conversation on the subject with the neighbor, Heather. She politely checked to see if Asher would be okay with her dogs, and I was able to express that we just don’t know for sure. Happily, the dogs all behaved while coming within maybe 10-15 feet of each other, and followed commands to focus/refocus on each of their owners every time we asked.
It was comforting that the mere sight of the dogs didn’t send Asher into a tizzy. Heather understood that Asher might be protective of his property and possibly of me, as well. It was the second close encounter in two days with them without incident, so there’s hope it could become a non-issue in time.
Speaking of protection, we are happy that the Visa credit card company contacted Cyndie yesterday by both a phone message and a text with a fraud alert of $8759.00. Always wary of phishing scams, she responded by calling the phone number on the back of her card.
Sure enough, it was a fraudulent transaction. Cyndie had just used her card earlier in the day at a restaurant in Woodbury for lunch. She called the manager to alert them of the unauthorized transaction, in case there was any connection. She had been seated at the bar, so they didn’t even have a server other than the bartender.
The manager was very helpful and looked up her receipt, offered to review the surveillance video, and volunteered to cooperate with any police investigation. Adding intrigue, the $8759 was charged to a cookware supply company. Hmm.
Cyndie chose to contact the Woodbury police by email with all the details. More information will be provided as it becomes available.
It’s kind of sad when dogs behave better than people do.
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Relative Something 