Posts Tagged ‘family’
Just Know
This deserves to be a blog post. The question posed was about how to stay positive despite the scary amount of negativity in the world. Far be it from me to come up with a concise reply.
I knew how to answer it for myself, but I had to think a moment, about how to communicate my process to another person. It was a wandering explanation, as each insight I explored seemed to spawn another that deserved mention.
What came to me right at the start was that having a positive disposition isn’t something that I do, it has become something that I know. The rest of my rambling response was an attempt to provide enough background to give the words more weight than just a routine platitude. It doesn’t seem logical to me to offer advice along the lines of just needing to “know” that things are not as bad as they appear to be. On the other hand, does it suffice for me to proclaim that they simply need to live through enough experiences to gather the insights I have acquired?
I don’t think I can reclaim everything I came up with at the time, but the simplified version of why I know things are not as bad as it seems is this:
I have overcome a history of depression. I have mended a dysfunctional relationship with my wife. I have almost completely eliminated my exposure to commercial broadcast media. That alone, probably makes the biggest difference on the amount of unwelcome news and energy that was previously bombarding me.
I have become aware of energy that we emanate and absorb. This one isn’t as ‘out there’ as may appear to some people. Science has proven that emotions are contagious. It is easy to notice that a depressed person in the room can bring people down, an angry person will spread bad feelings, and a happy and pleasant individual can lift the spirits of those with whom they interact. I have witnessed the impressive distance our electromagnetic heart field energy radiates, during my time working with horses in Arizona when I joined Cyndie for the conclusion of her apprenticeship training.
Our energy is a powerful force. We should arm it with something positive and profound. I have always felt in my core that love was the vital component of all human interaction. We know to “love thy neighbor” and many of us believe we should love our enemies. I believe love is the way to heal, to bring peace, to raise healthy individuals, and, radiated in advance, to engender best possible interactions with others. Let love be the primary vibe riding on your projected energy field and you shower all in your vicinity with good will.
All of these things combined, provide a sense of knowing, despite all that seems wrong in the world –and think about it, people have been predicting that the ills of the world indicate ‘the end is near’ for eons– we hold unbelievable power for good with our love that can blossom if we alter our focus from all that is wrong, dwell on all that is right, and develop our skills to radiate healthy love in every direction. It magnifies. Love begets more love.
Try it. You can’t help but have a positive disposition when you put your attention to it!
It’s Sunday
It is Sunday, and we’ve got more things on our mind to accomplish today than there is time to achieve. It is both wonderfully exhilarating, and frustrating. Luckily, we are pretty used to this scenario, and tend to roll with whatever pops up, consciously choosing to not let it frustrate us too much when we don’t get it all done. Not being able to get it all done is one of the reasons it has taken us this long to get where we are.
At the same time, we frequently hear messages that we have accomplished a lot in the short time we have been here. It is a relative perspective, eh?
Last night, Cyndie got a text from her niece, questioning whether we had gotten horses yet. No, not yet.
I’ve been dabbling with getting a web site created for Wintervale Ranch and creating a logo. I know what I want, but need to learn more of the functional manipulation of vector graphics and using Adobe Illustrator, which somehow Cyndie has on her computer. I think that is funny, because she has no idea how to use it. I know just enough to quickly get entirely frustrated (gee, there’s that word again) over not knowing how to achieve the outcome I can visualize in my mind.
I need to learn how to properly manipulate files to load our Wintervale site with pages. Time in front of the computer screen is time away from the work that remains to be done on the property. (And time on the computer doing Wintervale web site work is time stolen from composing Relative Something posts…)
Yesterday, Cyndie brought home additional panels for Delilah’s outdoor kennel. We want to expand it to give her enough space to be comfortable relieving herself in a spot that is away from her “living” area. Currently, it appears she waits all day for us to let her out, which really defeats the purpose of her having an outdoor kennel.
Delilah is doing great, by the way. We have mostly kept her leashed since her run into the neighbor’s field where she found the carcass that kept her from heeding our commands to return. We are exercising her on returning to our calls, providing treats and praise when she obeys. Repetition, repetition, repetition. She is a great dog, and excellent companion, so it is well worth our effort.
The cats are less enthralled with a canine companion, but they are making the best of the situation. Since the dog is mostly confined to the front room of the house, I am always surprised when I find her balls in the bedroom or bathroom. I think the cats enjoy being able to confiscate them. I have caught Mozyr eating out of Delilah’s food bowl more than once. When the dog’s away, the cats do play.
We have noticed evidence of a bat in the house (droppings and scratching in an inside wall), but have not seen any in flight, lately. As the season continues to shift toward winter, I wonder if the dog and cats will deter the likely onslaught of bats and mice, in case we get anything like what stormed our fortress last year.
It’s Sunday. I’ve got to get out and join Cyndie in some work. Hope you enjoy your day!
Memorable Weekend
Returning to work can really increase the feelings of longing for the pleasures recently enjoyed over a holiday weekend. Since I had Monday off, that made yesterday my first day back after the long break. Yikes, what a contrast. The day-job doesn’t have nearly the appeal of a long weekend at the lake place.
What a great time we had this year, with our annual batch of games, followed by dinner at the lodge and fireworks shot from the beach after dark.
I was in something of a hurry to get home and pick up where we left off with projects at Wintervale, but after arriving back to chores, the allure of the lake just became more enticing. Add to that, a dose of the day-job, and thoughts of returning to the lake become all-encompassing.
It says a lot when people in a community like that influence you so deeply, after just a brief visit, that all you can think about is finding a way to return to be with them again.
It’s too bad I don’t have a job that involves hanging out with friends and family for days on end. I think I would be well-suited for a position like that.
Growing Family
Yesterday, we added a new member to our family. Her name is Delilah. She is a 10-month-old Belgian Shepherd dog, also known as a Belgian Tervuren. Ultimately, we expect her to be a perfect fit for us here, but it will take a while to get the cats and her adjusted to fully accepting each other. I now have even more adventures to write about here, and we haven’t even added horses yet!
Great Generosity
Much to my horror, I have become that guy who hangs on to a borrowed item way too long. It ends today.
Last fall, my sister’s husband, Tim, offered to let me try out his chainsaw to give me a reference for deciding what I wanted to buy. I hoped to do some wood cutting right away, before winter set in, and then get it right back to him.
In a blink, fall was gone, and I hadn’t done any cutting. I eventually found two convenient opportunities to try my hand at starting it, and doing some light work on small trees in our woods. I was pleased to have successfully started it on a cold winter day. The saw seemed the perfect size for me, but I had only tried to do the smallest of work with it at that point.
Then the days rolled off the calendar, and winter became spring. I checked in with my sister, to report that it hadn’t skipped my mind, that I felt bad I’d kept the chainsaw for so long, and that I wanted to get it back to Tim before he found a need to use it. I really didn’t want him to have to ask me to get it back. Mary assured me that he wouldn’t be needing it for a while, which provided some peace of mind for a few more weeks.
Now spring has turned to summer, and storms are throwing trees down, left and right. If ever there was a time to have possession of your own saw, it is now. Unfortunately, I still had Tim’s. Then, last weekend, we had a tree fall onto the road, down by our driveway. It was the perfect opportunity for me to give his saw one last trial run, and then return it. I boldly collected everything I thought I would need, and loaded it in our little trailer, driving the lawn tractor down to the road.
Then I promptly flooded the chainsaw engine and it failed to start.
A flooded small gas engine is one of my weaknesses.
I took the chainsaw back up to the shop and removed the spark plug to dry it, and revisited the manual and a couple of online sites for advice, and then gave it another try. Yep, flooded it again. They make it sound so easy. That’s the part that eats at me. Why can’t I figure it out? I gave up after a couple more failed attempts, and went down to finish the job with a hand saw. Cyndie had already stepped in to help, using a ratcheting cutter to trim all the branches up to the trunk.
After the multiple failures over the weekend, I wanted to prove to myself I could successfully start the saw again. Yesterday, after work, I fired it right up, first try, and it worked like a charm. I headed around to the back of the house where a dead tree stood within view of our bedroom window. For the first time in my life, I felled a standing tree. I’m proud to report that my first felling also happened to be a tree leaning the opposite direction from where I wanted it to fall.
It took an extra cut, when the height of my first one was too low, and then a little persuasion from a strap to swing it over and snap the “hinge,” but it landed right where I wanted. And, I didn’t nick the adjacent tree I was hoping to save.
A chainsaw like this one should work just fine for my needs here.
Thank you, Tim, for the generous gesture of offering the loan, delivering it to us here, and being patient with the long wait for me to return it.
We are ever so grateful for the encouragement and support from both my sister, Mary, and her husband, Tim!
Mud Management
Through the thick and thin of challenges we have faced since we moved to this beautiful place in the country, the one thing that remains solid for us is our foundation of friends and family, near and far. Yesterday was a priceless coincidence of hearing from many of them, all in a very short span of time –primarily because Cyndie happened to check her email, and found messages from both Portugal and Guatemala. We also enjoyed phone calls from family in Boston and on the road home from Hayward, from my friends on the bike trip, and we were blessed by a weekend visit of our son, Julian, and his girlfriend, Allison.
The folks on the bike trip did indeed get wet yesterday. That is one part of the trip that I don’t mind missing at all. I was able to enjoy the rain that fell at our place, in perfect amounts to water our freshly planted grass. Unfortunately, the rain also contributed to keeping the wet spots by the barn, extremely wet.
On Friday, when Cyndie was doing some mowing along the driveway, she got herself stuck, and called me to help get her out. When I arrived, she said the front wheel dropped into a hole. Sure enough, it did. To my surprise, when we backed the tractor out of the hole, I discovered the hole was full of water! It might be hard to discern from the picture on the right, but the spot where this hole full of water is located, is uphill from the barn.
It seems really strange to me how the ground at high spots around here, holds water which logic tells me should be draining downhill to the lowest areas. How can we expect the ground around the barn to dry out, if the areas uphill from there are still saturated?
Out of frustration for waiting to be able to make progress down by the barn, I decided to see if I could advance the project, working by hand. There is just no way they can bring any heavy equipment in to work on this new drive, that doesn’t end up just making it worse. While Julian mowed some of the extremely tall grass by the new driveway loop we are trying to create, I began to fill in the ruts left by the skid loader the last time the crew was here.
We figure that when this area finally begins to dry out, we’d rather have it drying in the condition we want to see, not the rutted mess it has been thus far. After I got about a third of it smoothed out with a rake, Julian and I tapped it down with our shoes. It was so spongy, we couldn’t use anything else. We tested running the garden tractor over it, but that was too much.
The best way to describe the condition of the dirt in the wettest spots is that it is like freshly poured concrete. I was basically troweling it with the rake. I could support my weight with one foot on a spot that was a bit firmer, and then just tap the surface with my other foot, to erase the rake marks.
When it gets dry enough, I’ll go to the next level by driving the garden tractor over it. With any luck, by the time the water is completely gone, we’ll have a foundation of driveway that is as hard as concrete.
As Planned
photo by Elysa Hays
With rain threatening for most of the morning, we stuck to our plan and started the day focusing on the landscape pond. We rearranged a lot of rocks, placed the pump, built a waterfall, and then stacked stones around the plastic tubes to make them less conspicuous.
Cyndie had purchased supplies to help keep the water clear, and set about tending to that. Elysa served as my consultant, giving me feedback on how my placement of stones looked from afar. Elysa also took a turn at capturing photos, and pruning dead growth from the few perennials growing out of the water.
Since we are experiencing problematic wetness around the property this spring, it feels nice to finally embrace water for once, as opposed to frowning over it, longing to see it gone. Cyndie wrapped the water line and power cord from the pump with some vine leaves, and after topping off the overall level with a bit of fresh water from the hose, we declared the pond complete and ready for the season.
We are lucky to have had the help of Elysa and Anne all weekend on the variety of things we chose to do. We didn’t make it to the work weekend up at the lake place, but having them here made it feel like a special weekend, and their efforts provided great gains and priceless company on the first Memorial “work-weekend” at Wintervale.
Intermediate States
We have arrived at the U.S. holiday weekend of “Memorial Day.” For us, this usually means a trip to the vacation getaway of Cyndie’s family, in Hayward, WI, for “Work Weekend.” This is the time when the property gets a major cleaning, the beach gets raked, toys and floatation devices pulled from storage, and boats get scrubbed and hauled down to the lake. The work culminates in a spectacular community feast at the main lodge.
We aren’t there this year. It feels strange.
We have our new property to tend to this spring, and have been granted a pass from contributing our labor to the lake place.
It feels as though everything at our place is hanging in an intermediate state right now. The two biggest projects, the hay shed and paddock fencing, have been stuck in limbo for weeks, waiting for conditions to dry.
I think the geothermal furnace installation looks complete, but I don’t know the status of whether or not it is fully operational. Almost all the work of installation occurred while we weren’t home. Each day last week, I would check progress when I arrived home from the day-job, trying to discern what had been done, and why, and how. As of last night, it looks like everything is wired and plumbed, but we found no indication of the status, nor instructions on operation. They did leave manuals out. I suppose I could do some reading.
We finished digging up the drain line from the septic tank. It looks like the distribution box is disintegrating. It also looks like there are a lot of illogical twists and turns in the plumbing. I have no idea why they originally chose to do it the way they did, but it did work fine, as far as we can tell, for almost 25 years, so we won’t redo the whole thing. The septic professional I have been consulting has located a replacement distribution box, and will also replace the section of cast iron pipe originally used. It being a holiday weekend, that work will not happen until next week some time, weather permitting.
We need to do a lot of cutting of grass, as the growth is so rapid this time of year, it gets long on one end of the property before you finish cutting the other. Julian helped us greatly last weekend, by doing the first cut of the season, but he wasn’t able to mow the back hill, due to geothermal installation that was in process. It had time to grow doubly long, and we knew rain was coming, so we jumped on that chore late yesterday, before it could get any worse. I am happy to report that Cyndie was eager to have a lesson on the operation of the tractor, and then looked to be having so much fun, I might get away with doing a lot less of the grass cutting around here than I previously anticipated.
In a classic demonstration of our different modes of operation, Cyndie took off with glee, mowing around a tree and then wheeling off in any direction, haphazardly picking off areas of long grass wherever it appeared in her view. I am inclined to mow in a line, back and forth, very methodically. I am a bit more timid. She boldly devoured areas that deserved to be cut, but that I would have been hesitant to try with that mower. I was thinking it would require the brush hog attached to the large tractor. She demonstrated otherwise.
Cyndie and I are a great combination. She spotted some mushrooms growing under a dead pine tree in our front yard. I told her they tasted funny and she got all riled up, exclaiming that I shouldn’t eat them until I know what they are. I was teasing her, of course. Comparing images we found online, we are very confident that these are the very popular and definitely edible morel mushrooms.
We started tending to our little landscape pond with waterfall, but finally came to the full realization that they didn’t leave a pump behind when they moved out, so that project is awaiting a purchase. One more thing hanging in limbo. We also may try to test drive a pickup truck this weekend, a task we have been talking about accomplishing for months.
One last thing that has us feeling unsettled is how much we miss our friends, Alane, Dunia, and Marco. Cyndie has been working with Alane and Dunia for much of her Epona apprenticeship training. I met them and Marco last weekend, and in that short time, developed a deep feeling of connection with all of them. We feel a deep longing to have them here with us, and, in turn, they have indicated a desire to have us visit them in Guatemala and Australia. Long distance relationships can be hard, but we truly hope to make these connections flourish.
Our projects may hang in an intermediate state, but our friendships are definitely established.
Can’t Stop
Okay, I admit it: we are smitten with my son’s new album. I awoke this morning with one particular song running in my head. I just needed to hear it again, and when Cyndie noticed the sound of it playing, she asked me to play it again, out near the kitchen, where she could hear it better, because she wanted to hear that song, too.
If you read yesterday’s post here, and didn’t want to explore all the songs on Julian’s album, I will promote one for your consideration. Listen to “Of Mistress, Master, and Malcontent.” This song includes vocals from Dave Marshall, Julian’s friend in Chicago, and the blend of their voices together is a joy to behold. They have created an arrangement in this song that is captivating, and I think deserves to be heard by a wide audience. I have submitted it to a local radio station for consideration.
Do you think they will be able to see past the gushing parents to take time to consider the music for its own merit?
I hope so. That would make today a real SUPER Sunday.
Enjoy the day!
Big Accomplishment
This past week, we received an email from our son, Julian, with the subject: “My album has been RELEASED!”
Even though some of my son’s taste in music is different than mine, I can’t stop myself from listening to the whole thing, over and over. What a parental rush!
You can read his descriptions of the What, Why, and How, and listen for yourself at the web site he created to share his music: jaywalkerbroadcasts.com.
I recommend you sample enough songs to discover the wide variety of voice and instrument he has put together.
Talk about highly capable, he wrote songs, played all the instruments, sang, recorded, found and financed a professional studio to do mixing and mastering, and then built the web site to distribute his product. And, he did this as a side project to his current full-time day-job. To say we are proud of him, and all he accomplished with this, is an understatement.
When I was young, and heavily interested in recording artists of the time, one thing that boggled my mind was, when individuals would play all the instruments at such an accomplished level, so as to be able to produce a marketable product on their own. Now my own son has done just that!
I remember showing Julian a few things on my guitar when he was little. Then, he took up percussion in the school band, and off he went, playing guitar in rock bands, becoming an accomplished drummer, developing his singing, and developing skills on keyboards and bass guitar. Julian has performed live, in a variety of bands, in a wide range of venues. It’s the stuff that some folks dream of doing, and others actually make a living doing, but he has done it as just one of his many life interests.
Cyndie and I are always thrilled with the music our children make. I’m pretty sure we were annoyingly proud of watching our kids as marching band percussionists for many years. We drove Julian to ‘battle of the bands’ gigs back when he and his school friends didn’t have driver’s licenses. We were also fixated for quite some time on a video that Julian and friend, Dave Marshall, produced while Julian was living, and going to school, in Stockholm, Sweden, and Dave was back in Chicago. I’m including it here again, with Julian’s permission, because we still love it so much.
Julian has now gathered years of his music in a present day recording. He has included guest artists from high school and college days, and put together a legitimate album that he is distributing free on the internet. We think this is a really big accomplishment. I hope you will give it a listen, and then share it with all those who you know that have an appreciation for what he has produced.
If you agree with me, that his efforts are worthy, I invite you to post a comment at his site, or on any of the music sites he links, so he doesn’t just hear it from Mom and Dad. We all know, our support can appear to be a little biased.
Relative Something 