Posts Tagged ‘fence post’
Temporary Fix
Sometimes a girl just wants a little alone time. I don’t blame her one bit. Poor Mia holds the dubious position of being last in the herd hierarchy and frequently gets told she is not allowed to stand where she happens to be at a given moment. Constant admonishment has got to get old. I find it annoying to watch.
It makes Mia the jumpiest of the four horses. Yesterday, I spotted her laying down for a mid-morning nap all by herself way out in the front field.
The situation stood out to me because, for a horse, that vulnerability of laying down to sleep usually relies on another member of the herd watching over them. I suppose Mia had just gotten fed up with the rest of the herd and needed a little extra space.
When I got close enough to see around the barn I was relieved to find the herd wasn’t entirely neglecting to keep an eye out for one of their own.
Light was standing guard, just from a distance this time.
I always feel a little bad about interrupting a napping horse and paused for a moment, on my way to put a splint on the broken post, taking pictures while contemplating whether or not to proceed. I hadn’t even finished that pause when I saw the initial movements of the way a horse gets up off the ground. Mia’s nap had ended.
Did she feel the energy of my arrival? It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
It isn’t pretty, and I doubt it will withstand any additional assault from the weight of a horse, but I’m thoroughly satisfied with the temporary fix of the post that Swings ran into at the gate opening.
I had grabbed the first two saved sections of 2×4 I saw leaning on a wall of the shop before hiking down to the scene of the damage. This band-aid will suffice for now. Being that it is located well out of view from most vantage points, there is a high likelihood I will let this crude “temporary” repair remain in place until a new reason triggers a need to replace it entirely. I’m in no hurry to go through the effort of unscrewing all the boards and pulling up the bottom half of the broken post to install a whole new one.
Temporary is a relative measurement, isn’t it?
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Rewarding Progress
We started the day with some group exercise, walking the horses, in pairs, uphill and down, but the main event of the day yesterday was a divide and conquer effort on the ranch. I’d say we conquered. On top of that, we did so under a time constraint, because we had Cyndie’s 40th high school class reunion to attend for dinner back in our old stomping’ grounds an hour’s drive away.
My main goal was to tend to the manure composting area, which was getting overfull and in dire need of rotation. With time limited, we decided to just transfer a large portion of the old piles to a secondary storage location and dump them in one big pile for distribution later.
That plan led to selecting and preparing a new spot for a pile of (mostly) composted manure. The place we settled on, near Cyndie’s wild flower garden on the north side of our driveway, was all tall grass and weeds. We are a little sensitive about weeds right now, and I did intend to eventually knock down the growth in the pasture area over there, so my focus suddenly shifted to using the diesel tractor and the brush cutter to mow the entire area.
That’s a big project, and more than I planned to bother with at that time.
Cyndie volunteered to take on relocating the piles of manure on her own while I mowed —no small task— and we were off. That area on the north side of the driveway has a lot of pine trees that create quite an obstacle course for the big tractor. It turns the project into a busy process of maneuvering, offering very little physical or mental rest in the tractor seat.
I only picked off one T-post along the fence line, and hit one large hidden rock, but the number of pine branches abused was too high to count. To her credit, Cyndie hit a grand slam of progress in moving ALL of the oldest piles from our composting area.
Delilah got the short end of things for the day, as we had little time to smother her with attention before serving her dinner in her kennel and hitting the road to visit our past. The reunion dinner was located a stone’s throw from our old Eden Prairie home, at the Bent Creek golf club.
I graduated a year after Cyndie, so I was attending as a spouse, but high school lasts 4 years with multiple grade classes, so I knew many of these people as well as I know my classmates. Some were neighbors from when I grew up, others were siblings of people in my class, so it was just as fun for me to visit and catch up with folks as it was for Cyndie.
I had an additional agenda to collect information from the planners and check the number of attendees to use as reference in planning the reunion for my own graduating class, next year at this time. The first meeting for our planning committee has just been scheduled to occur a couple weeks into August.
Holy cow, August starts tomorrow! My class reunion is just a blink away.
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Relative Something 