Posts Tagged ‘high heat’
Home Heat
We got home yesterday in the middle of the day, and the heat outdoors was still set to “High.” After a night without power at the lake, the four of us who had stayed one more night –Cyndie, me, and our friends, Barb & Mike– sat in the porch and contemplated our situation.
We had enough leftovers to feed ourselves for breakfast, but then we would create dirty dishes that needed washing at a time when we had no running water. A restaurant breakfast was looking like a favorable alternative.
I reported seeing an Xcel Energy utility truck cruising up and down the Wildwood road in the pre-dawn hour, which was an encouraging sign that they were aware of our problem. Cyndie was able to text her brother, Ben, to learn he had received an email notification that power was expected to be back on by 7:30.
We decided to hang around long enough to see if that would prove to be accurate, placing virtual bets on actual timing. A short time later, 7:23 to be exact, the landscape pond waterfall sprang to life, revealing we were back in business. Sheets went into the washing machine, and breakfast was reheated.
Closing up the house for departure from the lake place was done with much more confidence than if we had needed to do it in the dark, not knowing which light switches may have inadvertently been left in an “on” position.
In the absence of a huge lake to keep us cool at Wintervale, we thankfully enjoy the benefits of geothermal-sourced air conditioning in the house. Asher seemed happy to see us again, but after a short walk outside in the hot sunshine, he quickly sought out one of his preferred cool spots to rest.
As always, the horses appeared very tolerant of the harsh conditions, enduring the uncomfortable humidity with a stoic calmness, despite pesky flies and the absence of a longed-for breeze.
When it came time to feed the horses, we let Asher roam off-leash on the way to the barn. He spotted a squirrel that had been feeding on spilled grain under one of the feed buckets and gave chase.
The critter made one brilliant maneuver that I figured would save it from capture, but Asher stayed after it. They both disappeared into the jewelweed around a tree, and just as I was expecting to see the squirrel leap up the trunk, we heard a squeak instead.
Asher emerged from the underbrush and immediately trotted off to bury his quarry. I guess it’s never too hot for a predator/prey drive to play out. We figure he is just protecting the horses from these pests and putting the rest of the scavengers around here on alert that they are risking their lives if they are going to mess with things around the barn.
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Yes, Hot
It’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity, too. I started receiving weather warnings from the app on my phone sometime in the middle of last week. While at a restaurant on the bike trip, I spotted a weather map on a TV screen over the bar, and it looked like 80% of the US was depicted with a burning deep-red, indicating extreme heat was on the way.
Well, the heat has arrived. Try being a 1200-pound horse in this kind of weather.
Cyndie put out the large water trough that the horses have a history of splashing in when we intended it to be used for drinking. Now we would be glad to have them splash in it.
Mia came right over while Cyndie was filling the tub from a hose and dipped her face into it. I said she should have placed the trough under the shade sail. We may still move it there later today.
Asher isn’t taking the heat much better than the horses. Luckily, he has an air-conditioned house to lounge in. He begrudgingly accompanies us on walks to tend to the horses.
I am deeply grateful that this level of heat didn’t occur while we were biking for hours every day. If there were a choice between riding in the rain or high heat, I would choose the rain.
Unfortunately, I still have some mowing to do today. I’m going to try to finish before the hottest part of the afternoon. Not that it matters, since the temperature was 81°F with a dew point of 72° when we woke up at 6:30 this morning.
Yeah, it’s hot outside.
There is one really cool thing about today, however. It’s Elysa’s birthday!! Here is a celebratory photo of her from six years ago:
Happy Birthday, dearest! Stay cool!
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Holiday Monday
Today is Labor Day in the U.S., a holiday that alters my life very little at this point. We will drive home after a fabulous weekend on the water on a day when high heat is expected to be baking our part of the planet once again. I’m not getting ready for a new school year or returning to a workplace routine tomorrow, both fall milestones I dealt with for most of my life.
It means a lot to me to not take the benefit of being retired for granted. I feel ecstatic to have the freedom to choose where I will direct my attention every day. It’s unlikely that I will notice that today is a holiday. I expect I will notice that the recent dirt landscaping along our driveway deserves my attention.
Now that I think of it, I may notice a little holiday traffic on the route south. Maybe a line at the Dairy Queen in Cumberland.
Not knowing how I would spend all of my time at the lake over the weekend, I brought my wood sculpting stuff and a guitar. I didn’t bring my bike. I didn’t even open my guitar case and I barely got started on sculpting before being interrupted and putting it away. I guess I spent more time at the pickleball court than expected.
Oh, um…, I got called out yesterday on that claim of “winning” the “tournament” after playing only one game on Saturday. We didn’t show up to play until after the appointed start time and the team with the dinner reservation had won two games by the time we took on the losing team.
Jennifer…, we stand corrected. You and Charlie deserve to claim that (virtual) trophy.
Steve and I played five or six games yesterday and won all of them, except one. That one we lost 11-0. I blame the wind.
The floating inflated water contraptions have been brought in for the season and buoys tied to the anchors. We are ready for summer at the lake to be declared done for another year.
The next visit to the lake place will feel that much more like fall. I wonder how soon the temperature will get the memo.
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Vanishing Act
One thing about the high humidity of the last two days that I didn’t expect is how spiders and mosquitos have taken over the woods. They probably like that it has been staying warm all night, too. It is very common to walk into a single strand of spider silk that crosses our trails but lately, it has been entire completed webs that remain invisible unless the light hits them at just the right angle.
Even after walking into it, you can’t see it but can feel it sticking and flailing to rub it off is far from successful. So you just flail even more.
Meanwhile, the mosquitos haven’t even been waiting for us to stop walking before buzzing our ears and attacking in numbers. It scares me if I have to pause and wait for Asher to do his business for fear I will be carried off by the marauders. I just resort to flailing as if I had just walked into a spider web.
One action that solves two problems.
So, Swings lost her fly mask yesterday. When we left the barn after serving their morning feed, all four horses had masks on, the fans were running on high, and we’d put out extra water for the day. When Cyndie checked on them mid-morning, Swings wasn’t wearing a mask.
We have not seen them venturing far from the fans very often since this nasty heat dome arrived so we both figured the mask shouldn’t be hard to spot. We were wrong. It was nowhere in sight around the overhang or inside the paddock. Nothing was visible looking out at the fields near the gates.
When serving their evening food, I took a walk through portions of the hay field and found nothing. At sunset, when closing up the barn and removing masks from the other three, I walked around in the back pasture and, again, found nothing.
That mask has vanished. We have no idea where she lost it. Usually, they rub up against something, so trees and fence posts are likely targets. I don’t believe the horses would have hustled out for a short visit to one of the fields and then returned before Cyndie showed up to check on them, so logic tells me it should be inside the paddocks.
I will expect to find it this morning while patrolling the taller growth in the paddock with the wheelbarrow looking for new piles of manure.
One other unlikely thing happened during this heat wave. We found a large branch about 3-4 inches in diameter lying in the yard beneath one of our larger oak trees first thing in the morning. It wasn’t windy and the wood looked healthy so I have no idea why such a large branch broke off.
When cutting it up, I saved several good sections for sculpting hearts and two long pieces that have a nice pattern. They will make for some nice coasters.
Can’t wait to do some sanding and polishing to see how they will look when all cleaned up. You know, do a vanishing act of those blade marks on the surfaces!
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Over Cooked
I worked outside in the humid heat yesterday for a little too long. My clothes were saturated with my sweat and my fingers were getting pruney even though I’d long ago ditched the gloves that were too soaked to be any good to me. I knew I was pushing the limits of my stamina but I wanted to finish some mowing with the push mower.
As I made my way to the shop garage to put away the mower, I could tell my muscle response was getting rather sluggish. It was past my dinner time and my body was running on fumes. Even my hearing and vision started to waver a bit as I cleaned up the deck of the mower before slowly making my way back to the house.
Before I could even peel off the soaked clothes that were clinging to my body, I succumbed to a powerful desire to lay down for a few minutes so no muscles needed to do any work at all. The cool tile floor of our sunroom fit the bill nicely. What a relief to immediately rest my entire body.
When I did try to move again, my muscles wanted to cramp. Cyndie brought me an iced electrolyte concoction to drink.
I was cooked. Overcooked. Cyndie offered to serve dinner, which I needed, but I was feeling nauseous and asked for a brief delay before eating. Getting out of my soaked clothes was going to feel good but I wasn’t looking forward to the effort it would require.
The reward for that effort came in the form of a shower. It was weird to enter the shower with hands already pruned and then have the pruning intensify. I wanted to make it short because I was too tired to stand for long but our shower has a spot to sit. My body chose to spend a few seconds seated under the spray whether my mind wanted to or not.
The air conditioning has been on in the house for a couple of days and that soon had me feeling colder than I wanted to be, which is weird after being too hot just 15 minutes earlier.
I started the day using our hedge trimmer to clean up the new growth on the natural green wall along our north loop trail. That tool is my new favorite, for sure. We now have two pathways tunneling beneath the branches of our big willow tree.
We got new blades for the little Stihl hand-trimming chain saw so I put one on and cut down some pine branches that were sagging into the pathway. What a huge difference a sharp chain makes.
The clouds have disrupted our viewing of the first supermoon of the month. Cyndie captured an interesting cloud formation on Wednesday that looked downright tornadic when I viewed it on the small screen of my phone upon receiving it from her in a text.
See what I mean?
Looks like we will be waiting for the blue moon at the end of the month for that eery glow illuminating views out our windows in the middle of the night. Cue the howling coyotes…
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Home Happy
I’m still thoroughly enjoying being home again but last night’s dinner of grilled pork chops left over from one of our fantastic meals up at the lake gave me a moment of hesitation as I mentally revisited the greatness of those days.
It’s a rough comparison since my day yesterday was spent sweating over pulling weeds, running the power trimmer, and mowing grass in the tropical heat wave of the hottest July on record. Who wouldn’t prefer to be back up at the lake?
Well, I’m pretty happy being able to sleep in our usual bed with the conveniences of a bedside table. I really like our shower. I’m spoiled by how much room there is, allowing for soaping up just beyond the spray of water. My regular routine of charging my phone and laptop works best with my home setup.
I like having the manure compost under daily control. Once every week or week and a half is just too much work all at once to get piles cooking efficiently again. Getting grass mowed before it gets too long is also a preference.
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After dinner, we walked the trash and recycle bins down to the road with Asher at our sides, making it back with time to spare before the first wave of thunderstorms arrived overhead. That weather came in with an ominous-looking cloud line and a dramatic burst of tree-bending wind.
The brief duration of the heavy downpour was a bit anti-climatic when that ended up being all that happened.
Not that I was looking for weather trouble. Quite the contrary. We already have the makings of a small canyon in the paddocks where draining rainfall has washed away the lime screenings into the main drainage swale. The battle against gravity and moving water is never ending in my quest to best manage runoff.
I’m afraid it’s time to extricate the back blade from the depths of the shop garage for attaching to the diesel tractor to scrape gravel back “upstream.” I was relatively successful the last time I tried doing that but the exercise remains on the fringe of skills I have acquired on the big tractor. It always feels like I am on the verge of making things a lot worse instead of better.
Regardless, we are home and that is making me as happy as it always does.
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Heat Remedies
Does anyone know when the climate crisis will become a crisis? I have no idea. Be careful to not fall down in places where the pavement is so hot it will burn flesh this week. I am very thankful we were able to spend the beginning of the week at the lake.
A breeze across the water is a wonderful gift of natural air conditioning. I spent a fair amount of time floating in the lake yesterday but I have no photos of those glorious hours. Cyndie sent me a picture from the pontoon cruise we took with some Wildwood folks and guests on Monday.
Her mom took a picture of Cyndie, Mike, Barb, and me on the deck with fancy appetizers before dinner yesterday.
I didn’t stop eating in time to offer my usual smile. Figs and Brie on toasted French bread slices. Can you blame me?
A week free of training Asher to behave has been a welcome respite. It was an unplanned bonus to have the weather be so hot the lake was the best place we could ask to be. I’m trying hard to hold a positive attitude about the fact we are leaving here today and heading home just as the heat is expected to max out for a couple of days.
I saw a headline last night that reported the seawater of South Florida was reaching hot-tub temperatures. I suspect the coral considers this a crisis already.
It won’t surprise me if Asher starts begging us to take him back up to the lake real soon. In the past, we filled a kiddie pool with water for Delilah when it got really hot but it’s not proving to be an attraction for Asher. We tried hard to coax him in there last week to wash off the fresh horse poop he smushed all over his vest and body. He chose to stand beside it instead.
Maybe today’s high temperatures will change his mind.
If not, I will probably end up being the one laying in it to experience a vague reminder of the big lake we’ve been enjoying up in Hayward for the past week.
It’s been a wonderful time but I won’t deny there’s also a part of me that will be happy to get back to my familiar routine, sweaty chores and all.
Our house has a great geothermal air conditioning feature that will be serving us well as our heat remedy in Beldenville.
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Successful Foal
We learned yesterday that three of Mia’s nine foals are still racing and the last-born filly just won a race at Churchill Downs on Friday.
“Shes a Secret” is a three-year-old who ran to victory, making us all proud for Mia and her last baby. Mia’s former owners stopped by to see her and express their appreciation for This Old Horse taking care of their retired broodmare. They told us that Mia was a very good mamma.
It was hot and muggy with miserable air quality due to smoke from Canadian wildfires and the horses were standing by our fans, stomping their legs to knock off biting flies. Not ideal conditions for hanging with the horses under the overhang. Cyndie noticed that Mia was really sweaty and wanted her to be looking her best when company arrived so she choreographed an opportunity for Mia to have better access to one of the fans.
Worked like a charm.
Mia posed for a few pictures and the visitors served up cool baby carrots for all the horses to celebrate the occasion.
I ducked out to check on Asher up at the house where Cyndie had left him with a bone to occupy him. He was doing fine but wouldn’t let that bone out of his mouth for nothin’. I put his vest on over the bone and we went out for a little walk. When he found a spot he liked, he dug a hole and dropped the bone in it. Then came the classic exercise of nosing dirt and leaves over the precious snack to save it for who knows when in the future.
He appears to have that natural instinct down perfectly well.
I am impressed with his ability to cope with the heat outside lately. He is such a hot bod and his dark color must really grab those sun rays fast, yet he soldiers on without complaint. Asher is quick to drink from our landscape pond, passing up perfectly good bowls of water to get there. He shows no hesitation about going back into the house where the floors are cool to lie on for naps.
There was no napping for me yesterday afternoon. I mowed grass around the barn to spruce up the place before our visitors arrived and failed miserably at avoiding the heat and bad air. I cooled off later by watching Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals on television.
With no prior favorite between the two non-hockey geographic location teams, I find myself leaning toward Vegas over Florida.
I won’t be placing any bets on it, though.
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Next Level
For the second day in a row, Cyndie has been able to spend some quality time with the horses. Wednesday involved some impromptu efforts to detangle knotted manes which then paved the way for more thorough grooming of all four mares yesterday. Cyndie said that Swings was getting lulled to sleep by the soothing effect of being completely combed out.
We discussed a shared realization that the horses would do well to be given a dose of training to reestablish proper respect for our presence in their proximity. I have not done more than a bare minimum of discipline in the months since Cyndie broke her ankle and I took on the role of primary person tending to the herd. They each have a tendency to behave disrespectfully on occasion and Light, in particular, has reared up in front of us several times which is not safe.
They have had more than enough time to adapt to this place as their home and us as their handlers. Since they are beginning to show some signs of undesirable behavior, we want to move to the next level of interacting with them. By “we,” I mean, Cyndie. She is much more experienced than I am in doing groundwork exercises with horses. My expertise has more to do with filling wheelbarrows.
Cyndie’s mobility is improving every day but is not quite where she needs to be yet for being quick on her feet and dancing with 1200 pounds of horse. While I was working on cleaning up the winter accumulation in the large paddock yesterday, I saw Cyndie trying to correct Light’s behavior while hardly taking a step. Light wasn’t displaying much sign of feeling intimidated.
Yesterday, we also decided it was time to protect the pastures from the horses while the new grass was trying to sprout. They have really been interested in spending time in the back pasture lately and when I finally closed the gate that was their access to it, they did not seem happy with me.
Luckily, they are willing to nibble any grass that tries to grow inside the paddocks. They were all grazing in there in the afternoon before I closed the pasture gate.
When I came down to serve dinner, they were all busy on the far side of the pasture. They showed up promptly when I set out pans of feed, which then kept them occupied while I walked over and closed the gate.
It was the second day in a row of record-breaking heat and it was again accompanied by a dramatic gusting spring wind that triggered a fire risk warning. Apparently, that all ends today. The weekend is expected to involve much cooler temps and chances of slushy precipitation. I’ve apologized to the horses in advance that their thick winter fur has been brushed loose and carried off on the wind.
As tough as this hot weather has been to deal with so soon, a return to snowy precipitation is not the next level we were hoping to experience.
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Training Pause
From the “no good deed goes unpunished” file, my zealous efforts of Friday produced a reward in the form of a strained muscle on the left side of my lower back. It doesn’t take much brilliance to figure out the wielding of a heavy pole saw with an engine on the low end and a spinning chain blade on the top turned out to be too much for my limited strength.
It has forced a pause in my biking and plank exercises that has altered a plan to maximize my conditioning prior to the start of The Tour of Minnesota biking and camping trip in June. Maybe it was fortuitous, because the weather has taken a harsh turn to oppressively HOT!
I am resting my painful muscle in the shade of the house. In a meager effort to be conscientious about the use of energy, I struggled to keep the house comfortable yesterday by managing open windows and closed shades. It was almost successful.
This morning, I have already closed the house up and turned on the AC. If I am going to get anything done outside today, as I slowly try to regain function, being able to return to a comfortable house will be very valuable.
I am home alone for a spell as Cyndie went to the lake place for a couple of days to contribute to the opening work-weekend. Jackie had a trip out-of-town planned before she moved in with us, so I am minding the ranch.
Delilah has been a sweetheart, allowing me to rest without constantly begging for attention. I think maybe she notices how crazy hot it is outside and her fur coat doesn’t like being out in the blazing sunshine on days like this.
Walking does seem to be good therapy for my sore muscle however, so we have made the rounds, staying in the shade of the woods as much as possible. This morning, we were rewarded with deer hoof prints on our trail that revealed the presence of a brand new fawn, based on the teeny-weeny size.
I tried to capture an accurate depiction of how tiny the little prints were, but even that doesn’t do justice to how surprisingly small they really look.
After we looped around on another trail, Delilah almost pulled my arm off when she struggled to chase some deer cutting into the woods by the labyrinth. The only view I could get was of a tail. No babies in sight.
Our next stop was the barn, to feed and clean up after horses. While we were in there, both Delilah and I noticed some shadows moving outside the front door. It was the chickens! They are expanding their territory nicely.
I’m impressed.
I’m also anxiously counting their numbers every time I come upon them. Still twelve.
Here’s hoping baby deer and baby chickens all find a way to achieve a healthy first year, and my strained muscle finds a way to heal fast enough that I can get back to biking, despite the heat.
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Relative Something 