Posts Tagged ‘footprints’
Got Away
Made it to the lake place yesterday afternoon for a few days of solo holiday. Without doing much in the way of additional cleanup of snow from Wednesday, in the morning I walked Asher with Cyndie, and we did horse chores together. The scenery was pretty striking, with the bright morning sunshine bouncing off the oodles of snow that had fallen.
The horses didn’t seem as fixated on their grain as usual, and Light even left her food to seek some hands-on attention from Cyndie. After obliging Light with lots of robust scratching, Cyndie ended up covered in shedded horse hair. When she got back to the house, Cyndie changed her shirt but moments later reported she was soon covered in dog hair.
After breakfast, Cyndie assembled enough home-cooked meals from our freezer to feed me for more than a week and sent me on my way for the drive to the lake. Before I left, I drove my car around the hay shed a couple of times to convince myself the crude job I did of clearing the heavy, wet snow would be adequate for traffic while I was away. We are expecting the farrier today.
I texted a message to Cyndie to let her know the tire tracks were mine and not some unexpected visitor. When we were walking Asher first thing in the morning, I spotted footprints in the deep snow of the north loop trail, so we trudged over to check them out. Cyndie asked if they were mine from the day before when I brought Asher back from the neighbors’, but I said no. We wondered who would have been walking on our trail.
Then, when we came upon a pile of branches under the snow, I realized it was me who had made those tracks. I remembered noticing the branches and had thought it was a limb that had fallen in the storm before figuring out it was the pile I had created when cutting up the downed tree a couple of days before.
Memory problems much, John?
When I had been pulling Asher down the middle of the unplowed road after his escape, I spotted a truck coming toward us and diverted to the ditch to give the driver the full width of the road to navigate his way against the drifts. We then made our way along that short section of our trail to reach our driveway. I blame the temper tantrum I was having at the time for completely forgetting we’d made those tracks less than 24 hours before. [shaking my head in embarrassment]
There is a lot less snow in Hayward. The short leg of the driveway to our place hadn’t even been plowed.
I am going to see how long I can keep myself from shoveling the front steps as an exercise in letting one of my compulsions go unaddressed for once.
While puzzling in the afternoon, I listened to a couple of 1960s recordings of Bill Cosby’s standup routines. I have no idea what caused me to think of choosing that.
I think my mind really needs to get away for a while.
.
.
Bright Morning
The water line in the Ritchie fountain needed a brief shot of hot water to flow this morning, but that will probably be the end of our water worries for a few days. The temperature is climbing swiftly this morning, and we will be heading out to pull off horse blankets as soon as I finish this post. It is easy to see travel patterns now that we’ve had plenty of days without new snow.
Here is the difference between one time down a trail and a frequently used path:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I’ve pointed out many times the icy patches in the large paddock that the horses avoid. Here is Mia soaking up the morning sun where you can see the horses cover a lot of the ground except for where they don’t:
That manure pile is my attempt to build a mound over the drain tile from the barn water spigot to keep them from squishing it. The water that drains from it creates that icy patch that the horses know to avoid.
This morning, I caught a shot of Mix’s grain mustache when she looked up from cleaning the spillage on Swing’s placemat.
It’s a pretty cheery day here in our oblivion, sequestered from any gloom or doom related to the evils of this world. It makes me feel a little guilty about how nice we have it. I don’t feel any guilt at all about making the horses’ world as blissful as possible for them.
For now, we are taking care of each other.
.
.
Fading Clarity
At the very same speed every day, twenty-four hours transpire. It’s our perceptions that produce the variable which makes time appear to pass slower or faster. I’ve described many times that I perceive my years of living in 20-year blocks. I’ve lived to twenty 3 times. For some reason, it is easier for me to process that perception than grasping that I have been alive for over sixty years. (61-and-seven-months at the time of this writing.)
It just doesn’t feel like sixty, except, never having been this old before, I wouldn’t really know how sixty is supposed to feel. The most tangible aspect of aging that I have experienced is my loss of perfect vision. Getting used to wearing glasses has been an arduous and frustrating adjustment for me.
Given lenses that offer a static level of correction for my continuously waning clarity, I add imperfect handling that constantly fails to keep them free of clouding smudges.
There is a benefit to my new norm of experiencing a fuzzy view. I don’t need to spend money on the latest and greatest high-resolution ultra-crisp display screens because they all look a little blurry to me anyway.
If I didn’t have a camera with auto-focus capability, I’d be sunk. Unfortunately, I now have a difficult time discerning whether the resulting images are worthy or not. Auto-focus is a far cry from flawless and I am now a weak judge of the resulting level of success.
Yesterday, we were out walking with Delilah at the moments of both the sunrise and the sunset. The morning was really cold and the wind-blown snow was mostly firm enough that our boots didn’t break through the crust. Delilah, being much lighter and trotting on four feet, had no problem staying on top.
In fact, we could see in her tracks that she was walking on her tippy toes to keep her pads from the stinging bite of the extreme cold.
I suspect that image could have benefitted from better focus.
I have a little more success with the long focus of vast landscapes. Sunset was a pleasure to experience and just enough warmer by that time of day that our urgency to get back inside was reduced.
Still, I perceive that image as falling short of my preference for a much snappier crispness.
There is an interesting dynamic in our house with regard to my slow decline from the glorious pinnacle of 20-20 vision and full reading-distance clarity, because, while this change is new to me, Cyndie has lived with blurry vision and corrective lenses her entire life.
It’s hard for me to ask for sympathy from her, although yesterday she admitted that she sees the difficulty I face since it’s a new adjustment for me that she has dealt with forever.
In the grand scheme of challenges we face in life, my learning to cope with fading clarity is a rather small one and almost universal for humankind. As the saying goes with all things aging-related: It beats the alternative.
.
.
New Identifier
One of the most common initial checks being made to assess someone’s health during the COVID-19 pandemic is the measuring of their temperature. I rarely take my temperature, partly because I rarely have a fever. When I do develop a fever, I tend to notice it right away, without needed to measure it. Only after it feels a little extreme do I tend to dig out the thermometer for an actual measurement.
A week ago I had no idea what my normal healthy temperature usually ran. I do now, at least my morning temperature, anyway. Since the primary symptom being checked in the current coronavirus outbreak is body temperature, I decided to self-monitor my temp to determine a baseline reference for comparison, in case I do get sick.
Isn’t the normal body temperature always just 98.6°(F)? Not exactly.
I’m finding my normal morning temp is around 97.4 degrees. I think our current daily temperature should become attached to our names as a new identifier. Use it in the same vein as academic suffixes.
John W. Hays, 97.4.
We will all begin to sound like our own FM radio station frequencies.
Think about it, though. You would know right away if someone was coming down with something by the number in their greeting.
“Hi, I’m 101.2.”
Whoa! Back off there, fella.
I think my temperature probably went up a little bit yesterday afternoon on my walk through the woods with Delilah. Apparently, there might be an ostrich loose in the area. If those were turkey footprints in the snow, that beast must be bigger than Ms. D.
Those brown circles are Delilah’s paw print and that giant boot in the bottom corner is mine. The bird that walked along our trail must be half my height.
I should probably take up wild turkey hunting. Get it before it gets me.
97.4, …signing off for now.
Stay a safe distance out there.
.
.
.
Cold Lonesome
It’s not feeling very springlike this morning. It dropped well below freezing last night and today dawned frozen like a rock. Cyndie is gone to visit her parents in Florida, so Delilah and I are in charge of caring for the chickens and Pequenita. Since Delilah is no help with either, I am pretty much on my own there.
The paddocks have become a lonesome place to pass. There are still a few piles of horse “apples” yet to be collected out in the farther reaches, but that will wait for some magical moment when it isn’t frozen solid, or so wet and muddy it’s impossible to navigate.
A neighbor posted a request for used T-post fence posts on our local online site, and we have some to spare, so Delilah and I spent time in the barn yesterday sorting out the ones missing anchor plates from those that have them, as well as culling a few that lack the quality of straightness.
Now they are laid out all over the floor in piles of five, something that we would not do if the horses were still here. It is freeing, but weird.
I also took advantage of having my music playing while I worked. We chose to avoid exposing our horses to the sounds of recorded music, so it was a novelty to be working in the barn with tunes on.
While we were tending to fence posts, I decided to begin dismantling the border that defined our arena space in a corner of the hay-field. Most of the posts are still frozen in the ground, but the webbing could come down.
It was beautifully sunny, but also cold and windy. Much of the work had me pulling my hands out of my gloves and soon my fingers grew so cold I started to lose dexterity.
Also, the plastic insulators weren’t very agreeable to being flexed open, so that didn’t help my cold hands any.
This morning, Delilah and I walked through the back pasture and reached the round pen, with its sloppy sand currently frozen, preserving the footprints of chickens. Only chickens.
It served to prod my lonesomeness for our horses.
.
.
Relative Something 