Posts Tagged ‘dog’
Embarrassing Excess
I am developing a complex about the number of boots, jackets and gloves that I seem to need to keep handy at our doors. Occasionally, Cyndie will clear the excess and stow it in a closet. When this happens, I try to respect it for as long as possible, but inevitably my plethora of outerwear re-accumulates, filling our entrances with my clutter once again.
This time of year is particularly difficult, because the transition from winter to spring brings a wide variety of conditions. I seem to be putting on a different boot every other time I go out. For deep snow and/or extremely cold temperatures, I prefer my Steger mukluks. However, they have a soft leather sole, and I frequently want something more robust for tasks around the barn, or with our machines.
My other options include another pair of insulated winter boots –with a rubber sole; my ankle-high muck boots; and (not pictured) my calf-high, steel-toe slip-on boots for when I’m going to be near the horses.
I really do wear them all, and often in the span of a few days. Around here, it can be almost summer-like one day, and the next, you might receive a foot and a half of snow (as happened here last year on May 2nd!).
It’s the same thing with jackets. The hooks by the door make it look like we are having a party or something, but no, two of those are Cyndie’s and the rest are all mine.
I’ve got a heavy canvas coat for the colder days, a light winter shell, my raincoat, and my favorite light jacket from Wilkus Architects. By the other door is my Columbia fleece and shell combination that is so old I decided to have it become the winter work jacket, letting it get dusted and rubbed by enough grime that you can hardly tell what color it once was.
Could I get by with just one pair of boots and one jacket? Not one that works well for all situations, that’s for sure.
Then I look at Delilah, who doesn’t wear boots at all. She goes in and out of the house, and her furry paws work just fine for every condition. Sure, we have to pull ice out from between her toes sometimes, and wipe her down with a towel when she comes in, but she makes those paws do.
I aspire to become as efficient as she is.
Although, I’ve got her beat on one thing. Her collection of chew toys and gnawed bones, antlers, and stuffed critters is ten times the clutter of anything of mine piled up around the inside of our house.
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Directing Flow
While walking through the muddy driveway in front of the barn I noticed that one of the “fixes” I tried last fall to control runoff appeared to still be doing the job this spring. Previously, the water on the barn-side of the hay shed would flow straight across the drive path into the paddock. I made a little channel at a diagonal across the driveway in hopes of directing the flow toward the far side of the paddock.
With all the snow piled up beside the driveway, there was nowhere for the water to go, so it began to pool up. I grabbed a shovel and set about remedying that situation. While I was working on it, Delilah showed up to help. She had already been racing through the mud that is beginning to appear in several places, so I guess I should be happy she likes playing in the puddles, too.
When it was time to head in, Delilah was a mess. Aaaah, spring. She has already started digging up the dirt that is becoming exposed at the front two corners of the hay shed. She appeared to be trying to get as dirty, muddy, and wet as was possible in the short time she had to run free after I got home and let her out of her daytime kennel.
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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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Intelligence Gaps
In the early dark of the first morning after the obnoxiously irritating hour adjustment to Daylight Saving Time, Delilah and I got up and started this day by ourselves. The cats were up, but not being noticeable, and Cyndie was sleeping as if the clocks hadn’t changed. I added wood to the fire and sat down to write, frequently interrupted by Delilah seeking attention.
The melt has started in earnest here and all that accumulation resting on metal roofs was set in motion yesterday, breaking loose and giving in to gravity with startling clamorous reverberations. Scared a few years of life out of Cyndie when it happened on the hay shed while she was inside it.
On the overhang of the barn where we added a gutter to minimize the dripping on the horses, the snow had slid beyond the gutter and was raining down. I had just walked up to tell Cyndie I was going to make a run to River Falls to pick up parts for the lawn tractor, and seeing the problem, grabbed a rake to knock the ice and snow down.
Let that be a lesson to me. I didn’t have a coat on, or a hat, or most importantly, gloves. I knew a little snow might fall on me, but it was a nice day and I took it as a challenge I could manage. What I didn’t anticipate was the damage a little falling ice can do to bare hands. I didn’t notice until I was on the way to town in the car, that my hands had suffered multiple cuts and scrapes. One particularly bothersome spot was missing a layer of skin. Ouch that stings.
While I was looking up at the gutter, and Cyndie was looking down, as she scooped up manure, Delilah decided to harass the horses in the paddock. In our continuing effort to have them learn to accept each other, neither of us chose to intercede on the confrontation. Then we heard Delilah yelp. I quickly turned to see that she looked just fine and was even still hanging around them. I don’t know if she got kicked or not, but we decided it was time to separate them. Time will tell if that will serve as a lesson to her or not.
She can be incredibly smart sometimes, and a bit of a doofus others. She knows that she is not allowed to bring dead animals into the house. We faced off for about 45 minutes one night, she on the deck and me at the back door. If she drops it, she gets to come in. So she drops the remains of this squirrel she caught and I open the door. She picks it back up and I close the door. It’s a wonderful game.
On Friday I saw her running around with the frozen remains of a rabbit, which kept her occupied while I focused on my own projects. As the day warmed up and she gnawed on her prize, I noticed on a subsequent trip between the house and the shop that the rabbit was no longer frozen. I headed in for lunch and in a few short minutes, Delilah showed up at the back door, looking ready to come in.
I opened the door and she immediately checked for the cats and made a circle around the room. I had barely finished closing the door when she stopped on the rug in front of the fireplace and coughed up a big chunk of that rabbit. She had been carrying it deep in the back of her mouth, obviously to be savored later.
I flung that door back open so fast, while shouting out my repulsed objection, that she knew exactly which rule had been broken. Without hesitation, she picked it up and marched back outside.
She’s smart, in that she understands the rule, and connives tricks to get around it, but then she goes and drops it right in front of me! How smart is that?
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Spring Things
For the first time in months, I finally got my car washed yesterday. The once shiny blue car was an ugly gray mess of accumulated salty road spray. The temperature didn’t get above freezing yesterday, but it was sunny enough for the March sunshine to be effective at making it feel warmer than it really was. The line at the car wash was long and the wait was even longer, but it felt worth the pause to get it taken care of before the next blast of precipitation starts the accumulation all over again.
There is a real sense of impending change lingering in the air around our place now that the daily low temperature readings are no longer negative numbers and the high temperatures are headed above freezing for a couple of days. The higher sun angle and the later sunset hour are probably contributing the most to the feelings of transition that are upon us.
The horses are already showing signs of shedding their winter growth. Delilah seems to have more energy than ever. Unfortunately, she has started a pattern of barking at the sound of a neighbor’s dog 10-acres distant who sits in a kennel and “shouts” a lot. I’m grateful that Delilah has chosen to just sit on our hill and bark back at the dog, as opposed to run off in search of it.
We think Mozyr has resumed his misbehavior of peeing where he shouldn’t. The other night, he did it on our bed while we were right there, distracted by a video Cyndie had leaned forward to view on my computer. When she leaned back, her hand discovered the wet spot. What the heck!? Now I keep thinking I’m smelling urine in the air in several places, but I can never sniff out a location on surfaces. Even though I almost don’t want to see the truth, we are going to get one of the UV lights that will illuminate the spots where the cats have peed. Obviously, it is important for us to know, but at the same time, I really don’t want to discover what I expect will be the vast number of incidents.
I stopped by the hardware store on the way home yesterday to see if my lawn mower blades had been sharpened and ready for pickup. They weren’t, waylaid by the onslaught of problem snowblowers that had been brought in after the last mega-snowfall. I thought I was being smart to get my blades taken care of during the off-season, when they wouldn’t be inundated with lawnmowers needing similar attention, but it’s only logical that there isn’t really an “off-season” at a hardware store. At least I got them in at a time when I won’t be needing them if the wait takes longer than I expected.
This coming weekend, we move the clocks ahead one hour for the start of Daylight Saving Time, and in two weeks from today the vernal equinox arrives. Spring is here! That means only about two and half months left when we are at risk of getting bombed by a monster snow storm. Isn’t that encouraging!
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Overactive Snowflakes
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It was an otherwise innocuous passing flurry of barely 3 inches of fluffy light snow. Delicate flakes, each one unique, falling in a graceful dance with the air, moving in a randomly synchronized patterned performance. How many snowflakes could there be? They pile up. They land on every available surface, and swerve to reach places not so available.
Yesterday’s snowfall draped itself softly over the wind-hardened drifts in the driveway to complicate an already challenging chore. I had walked over those drifts the night before when I took the garbage bin down to the road. They were packed so dense that I could walk on them without breaking through. It’s like walking on water. It’s just snow, so logic has it that a boot would submerge, but not when it gets packed this tight. Across the top I strolled.
Delilah is finding the latest snow conditions to be confounding. Sometimes she stays above, and sometimes she breaks through. At the speed she is usually traversing, it causes her to do a face-plant into the deep. Then she has to swim a bit to reach a place where she can switch to her deer-like leaps to bounce through the deepest parts.
When the snow stopped falling yesterday, there was plowing and shoveling to be done, again. Those light, teeny flakes that fall from the sky change dramatically when they come to rest en masse. They foil the attempts of machines that try to move them, causing the wheels of the tractor to spin in place against the weight of the snow.
Walking our property has become unthinkable without snowshoes. If I had time to get down to the labyrinth, I would verify that it was entirely invisible at this point, buried beneath the biggest accumulation of the year last week that was followed by the gale force winds and then topped off with the several fluffy inches yesterday.
Snowflakes are beautiful and brutal. I think that’s what makes them great.
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Walking Partner
The best thing I can do for my back is go for a walk, so as soon as I got home from work yesterday, I headed out with Delilah for a little stroll around the property. She is very entertaining to walk with this time of year. The snow is deep enough that she struggles mightily to make progress through areas of undisturbed accumulation, quickly resorting to leaping like a deer to pounce over, instead of plowing through it.
She is happy to follow the trails left by the deer, or where someone has previously walked, sprinting to get way ahead of me, and then turning to see if I’m still coming. She shows intense interest in the scents lingering in the footprints left by the deer, and spends protracted moments in olfactory detection. If I somehow manage to catch up and pass her, she bolts to close the gap and then leaps into the deep snow for several pounces to get around me before reclaiming the trail.
We came upon the pine tree that we picked up off the ground a few times last spring, and discovered it is showing signs of not having survived. It is one of several that aren’t looking so good, and has me thinking we should be planning to do some tree planting come spring so that we add more than we lose every year. We are already behind, because a similar pine on the front side of the house died last winter and had to be cut down.
While I was taking pictures of the tree, Delilah got in some small-game hunting beneath the snow.
She didn’t come up with anything except a face full of snow, which I attempted to capture before she shook it all off. I didn’t get much cooperation from her in terms of posing for photographs, but I think this does it justice.
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I was lucky that the deep snow tired her out enough that she reached her fill of being outside at about the same time I was reaching my tolerance limit for walking. On this day, the deep snow and my ailing back ended up balancing our walking partnership perfectly.
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Rambling Randomly
Late Sunday afternoon we got the horses fed, ushered Delilah outside to her kennel and then set out toward the far side of the twin cities from us, to the far side of Lake Minnetonka, joining our friends Barb and Mike at their house for the Superbowl game. It seems like it should be too far to go for a short evening visit, but spending time with them proved more than worth the drive. Plus, it being a Sunday evening, there was minimal traffic on the road and we made excellent time. It inspires me to avoid letting the drive interfere with staying connected to friends.
It’s now well over a year since we moved from the suburbs to farm country and I have finally taken the steps of transferring to a local doctor and dentist. I scheduled appointments with both for checkups next week. The transformation is becoming ever more complete. Now, if I could just learn to recognize good horse hay when I see it.
We have a number of bales that are moldy. We have a lot to learn about hay. Right now we are dealing with the accumulation of bad hay that we can’t feed to the horses. Online searches haven’t easily revealed any brilliant descriptions of what to do if you discover your stored hay is moldy. I don’t know if we need to get the bad bales away from the good ones. The most common suggestion is to use moldy hay for mulch in gardens. Maybe I need to advertise that we have garden mulch for sale.
While I was outside moving firewood up on the deck and splitting logs by the wood shed yesterday, Delilah was freely romping in the snow and exploring our woods. Eventually, she appeared with a kill clenched in her jaw. I have no idea what kind of animal it is –or, was. It is interesting to witness her demeanor change when she gets possession of a dead animal. Instinct seems to take over and she slips into wild carnivore mode. When she comes back in the house, I get nervous about the way she looks at the cats.
Gutter and soffit replacement resumes on the house tomorrow. I have made their work a little easier by clearing the most recent snowfall off the eaves and away from the vents at the peak. It had gotten so deep that our vents were covered completely. I haven’t heard anything from the builder who ordered our replacement window, but that should be arriving sometime soon. As much as I want to see progress there, I think it would be best if gutter and window replacements don’t overlap.
I’m back at the day-job 3 days a week now. I think it has me rambling randomly to process Wintervale responsibilities in my head so there will be some room for work related thinking that needs to happen. Don’t know if it will help any, but I see the rambling as a valuable exercise, regardless.
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 