Posts Tagged ‘helping family’
Days Disappearing
Where are the days going? The minutes and hours of the days following Christmas have disappeared in a blink for me. We have passed the time with little in the way of agendas beyond resting in recovery from the busy holiday activities. Adding a long nap in the middle of the day swallowed a big chunk of time. As has binge-watching a couple of streaming episodes for entertainment.
The weird weather hasn’t been much of a motivator. We are stuck in a pattern of in-between-ism. Not like winter, but well beyond fall.
The ground is so saturated from the recent rain that it seems to resist freezing solidly overnight when the temperature has dropped below 32°F. It gets firmer, but not rock-hard.
Asher has been a little stir-crazy and allowing him to lead on bushwhacks through the woods on a sniff-fari has produced a few obsessive bouts of digging dirt or chewing wood in a hunt for pesky varmints.
Yesterday morning he surprised me with sudden success in rooting a mouse out from its hiding spot. The poor critter wasn’t fast enough to evade his bite when trying to make a run for it.
The horses seem a little tired of the wet and muddy conditions, but maybe that’s a projection on my part. They’ve rolled in it enough times to look particularly rough and ragged.
I suppose the fact that Cyndie has been feeling under the weather the last few days has contributed to our loss of time. We’ve bailed on a plan to head to the lake over New Year’s Day. At the same time, she still soldiers on with projects like dismantling all her Christmas decorations around the house.
I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to connect a new surveillance camera to the software. Multiple attempts to identify the camera by serial number failed, but when I finally tried allowing the software to simply search for it, it successfully found it –identified by serial number. However, the software still wouldn’t connect to the level of displaying an image.
A software professional has offered to stop out and help me this morning. Thank you, Julian.
Once we succeed in connecting to the camera, there is a repeater to install. Getting the Ethernet cable from outside our log home to inside where the router is will be a trick. Then, we can test communicating with the camera when it is located near the barn. When that is achieved, I will need to figure out a way to mount the camera in a location that has AC power and a view beneath the overhang as well as out into the paddocks.
It’s obvious to me that these activities will swiftly disappear more hours and days from my life. Before we know it, it will be next year.
December, I hardly knew thee.
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Crucial Assistance
We couldn’t have gotten as far as we did yesterday without the generous support of my sister, Mary and her eminently capable husband, Tim. They showed up ready for action and made all the difference with the sawing and chipping.
Before they arrived, I succeeded in knocking down 4 of the 5 smaller trees, but the next step would have been a bit much for me, on my own.
For all the preparation I did, there was one important thing I neglected. The blade on my chainsaw wasn’t very sharp. Compounding that oversight, the spare blade back in my shop was labeled: “needs sharpening.”
Luckily, Tim brought his saw. Combining my ladder, his reach, and a few occasions with the pole saw, some of the many limbs of the 60-foot tree were felled without breaking the fence, although it did bend a couple times.
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We agreed on the time to stop working on individual limbs and take a crack at bringing the whole thing down, but there was still a lot of wood standing.
We tossed a rope up –using the technique of a weighted line I learned from my brother, Elliott– and I played anchor while Tim did the sawing. It was laughable to think my puny size was going to control what that tree would do. I felt it shift when it pinched Tim’s saw, but there it stood.
At this point, Tim talked me into moving the truck and tractor, just in case. We tried muscling that rope a few times, and then Tim called for the tractor. I backed up to put enough pressure that he could get the saw out and then stretched that rope to its limit. With classic cracking, the top of that old dead tree came over at a little bit of an angle.
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We got two-for-one, as it grabbed a wayward branch of the scrubby box elder tree next to it and snapped that as well.
The four of us worked diligently to process the results, but only put an initial dent in the ground work remaining.
Today’s chores will be much less dramatic. I’ll start by sharpening my saw blade. There will be a lot of logging cleanup action, but nothing as daunting as felling that big tree yesterday. Volunteers still welcome.
We couldn’t have done it without you, Mary & Tim. Thank you for coming over to play!
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Relative Something 