Posts Tagged ‘lake place’
Different Worlds
One fact I have failed to report about the lake place is that the water level of Round Lake is the lowest anyone we’ve talked with can remember. The long dry months up there have taken a visible toll. Oddly, in addition to the unbelievably low water level, we’ve suddenly got beaver activity in our lagoon. There isn’t even enough water to flow all the way through to the culvert on the far end, but a beaver has started to build a dam near the entrance to the lake.
Underneath the walk bridge, there is a pile of branches that have been assembled. Nearby, the obvious tooth marks are all the way around the trunk of a good-sized birch tree. It would be a shame if it has already been doomed as a result. Our caretaker has been notified, and the proper agents are being contacted about pest management.
If it involves live capture and relocation, I hope it goes to a completely different lake. I’ve heard there are places that are seeking beaver dams to improve certain wetlands. That would be a perfect match.
Meanwhile, we have returned to Wintervale, where the horses seem content as ever, and Asher looks thrilled to be back on his usual territory.
Just as I suspected, I have my work cut out for me in controlling the growth of grass blades in all the areas that get regularly mowed. Unfortunately, I won’t get much done today, as I will be heading to the suburb of Hopkins, MN, this afternoon for a reunion of past employees of the company I was at for eighteen years at the beginning of my technical career.
I was unavailable for a gathering they held earlier in the summer, so it’s important to me to be able to make it this time. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen these folks, and I have fond memories of most everything about the place and the people who I had the good fortune of working with for so many years.
That period of my life feels like it is worlds away from where I am now. I’m looking forward to catching up with folks who meant an awful lot to me during our shared work lives at a very interesting company that manufactured high-technology surface analysis instruments used by industries (particularly semiconductor-related), universities, and government research institutions.
That’s a long way from caring for rescued horses and managing 20 rural acres in western Wisconsin.
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Distinct Difference
What a difference a few hours and a little over a hundred miles made in our day yesterday. Asher and I started our day yesterday under a dramatic blanket of fog.
We could barely see Mia out in the field all by herself. When we came around the bend in the back pasture fence line, it looked like the other three horses were expecting us.
They quickly repositioned themselves as if to appear more nonchalant than they actually were. Having their sightlines reduced so significantly makes the horses a little more apprehensive about their situation. Showing up at the usual time to serve them nourishment went a long way toward easing their tension.
With the horses tended to, the only other assignment for the day was to drive up to the lake. Asher was all in for a long car ride. We were rewarded handsomely with lots of blue sky providing an ideal backdrop for the colorful trees glowing in the bright sunlight.
We arrived just a few minutes before John and Pam. Cyndie had prepared a lunch for us to enjoy before taking a walk to show them all of the Wildwood properties.
Asher seems pretty pleased to have all four of his favorite caretakers available for attention at the same time. That’s a big difference from the routine he is used to, where he only gets Pam and John when we have gone off and left him behind.
If today and tomorrow turn out gray and wet like the weather service has forecast, we will be even more grateful to have been blessed with the gorgeous day we were able to enjoy yesterday.
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Lake Bound
After a weekend of sports spectating, Asher and I are packing it in, and I’m driving us north this morning to join Cyndie at the lake. Our friends, Pam and John, will join us– a twist from the usual, since they are normally our animal sitters when we spend weekends at the lake. We wanted to share the lake experience with them for once and enjoy each other’s company over a leisurely few days.
Another friend, Michelle, will tend to the horses while we are away.
It was a heavy gray sky for much of the day yesterday. When the clouds broke open for a short time, the sunshine changed the energy dramatically. As much as I wanted to get out to enjoy it, I was in the middle of folding laundry while watching the end of the Vikings game. By the time the game ended, the cloud cover had thickened back up again.
It was just damp enough that I didn’t try to mow, but I wish I had anyway. The grass is still growing enough that it’s going to be longer than I like by the time we return home.
I’ll be mowing in October again. That shouldn’t be a surprise anymore, with the planet warming continuing unabated, but a lifetime of experience still lingers in my head. Our weather didn’t used to be like this.
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End Begins
We have officially witnessed the first obvious example of a tree’s leaves making the transition to fall. The end of summer is moving well into sight.
There is a high possibility that I played my last pickleball match of the season on the court up here. I had the pleasure of being invited to fill in a foursome two days in a row over the weekend. I was just beginning to get my touch back after a long gap since the last time I’ve played, and the next long gap is most likely starting today.
We set out for one more pontoon cruise after pickleball, taking advantage of the beautiful weather and reduced boat traffic of a Sunday. Since we had no destination planned, Steve brought his dog, Vern, along for the ride.
I think he was loving the wind in his hair.
When we got back from lunch on Saturday afternoon, we noticed a lot of large, white spots of bird droppings on the deck and a rare lack of activity around the hummingbird feeders. Wonder what we missed.
Eventually, one, and then two, made an appearance again, and soon the numbers returned to normal, with the usual swarming and flailing at each other for the shared resource. Cyndie has barely been staying ahead of their appetites for the sweet water. They are preparing for the journey to come, which will mean an end to the season of entertainment they bring just outside our sunroom windows.
Today marks the end of our August visits to the lake this year. We are driving home this morning to relieve our house/animal sitters in caring for things at Wintervale. We’re leaving behind a smaller-than-usual Round Lake. Dry conditions up here have added a foot of beach width due to the lake level being unusually low.
We’ll all be a lot happier when the end of this dry spell shows up. The uneven distribution of life-giving precipitation around the planet is maddening. While we are suffering, places like Edmonton, Canada, have broken records for rainfall amounts this summer.
Feast or famine. Something tells me these kinds of weather extremes will not be ending anytime soon.
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Classic Wildwood
We are up at the lake again. Imagine that. Cyndie rode up with our friend, Melissa, last Tuesday for a quiet two-day respite in the magnificent surroundings of northern Wisconsin. On Thursday, I drove to the Cities to pick up Cyndie’s mom, Marie, and brought her up for the weekend.
Adding to the classic Wildwood Lodge Club vibe, Cyndie’s brother, Steve, showed up for the weekend as well, on his way back from Chicago, where he had been visiting his kids.
The clouds of hummingbirds have been consuming quarts of sugar water at an unbelievable rate.
Another classic Wildwood flying creature visited us in the sunroom in broad daylight while Steve and I were talking. Out of nowhere, a bat was suddenly flying circles around the room. I jumped up and closed the double doors to the house, and Steve moved to open the sliding door to the deck.
The silly flying mouse didn’t figure it out on its own, so Cyndie showed up with a broom and helped shoo it out the door. Just like the good old days.
While I was working on the website for my high school class reunion next summer, I could hear the speedboat, driven by Steve, pulling tubers and skiers for repeated laps. That’s a Wildwood tradition if there ever was one.
Topping off the day in the most precious of Wildwood style, while the four of us were sitting on the deck, Cyndie and Marie in the middle of a game of CrossCrib, members of the Whitlocks next door (plus one guest) came up to join us. Soon, our group expanded to include one of the Wrights, and an impromptu cocktail party was born. That eventually led to a full-on dinner party.
How does that work?
Well, one of the secrets is that Cyndie had prepared dinner for the four of us by cooking all of the chicken on hand. There were more than enough mini potatoes, and we broke corn cobs in half. An already prepared elote corn salad was contributed by the Whitlocks, and we had a perfect summer feast on the deck over the lake.
Stories flowed from both deep in the past and the retelling of the events of the day. This amazing Wildwood community celebrated its 60th anniversary in July. Yesterday was a great demonstration of how vibrant and rewarding it still is.
It’s a priceless version of what the term “going to the lake” means to people in our part of the world. There are differing versions, but anyone who has experienced Wildwood Lodge Club tends to agree that what we’ve got here stands out as worth any effort to maintain.
It truly is a classic.
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Fun Moments
A few highlights from this weekend at the lake with Cyndie and her mom:
- Cyndie surprised us with some letters she recently uncovered in our archives at home while she was looking for something else. There were almost a dozen, still in their stamped envelopes, written to her by her family while Cyndie was going to school in Spain back in 1977. The amount of detail that Marie (unsurprisingly) wrote gave us a fascinating window into that time of our past. Cyndie had grand plans to have a friend join her after the school session ended to travel around Europe, but had to scrap that adventure when she became dangerously ill and had to return home. Apparently it was wicked cold in the Twin Cities that winter, and the high school hockey team Steve played with was having a winning season. Those subjects were among several that received repeated mentions.
- I spent a chunk of time working on a website for my high school class that we will use in promoting our 50th reunion next summer. Using text messaging to communicate ideas and get feedback from my sub-committee back in the Twin Cities, I was able to make good progress on customizing a pre-formatted site from a service into something more aligned with our sensibilities. You know, changing corny into cool. My classmates deserve something that better reflects who we were back in the 1970s, when “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H” were on television. That was back when our generation figured we were going to change the… Never mind.
- Yesterday afternoon, when I found myself getting nowhere in a struggle to outsmart the site’s formatting, I phoned my software-savvy son, Julian, for advice. We linked up so he could see my screen, allowing him to guide my explorations as we unraveled how the available features could be coped with to achieve my goals. It seemed promising when he discovered I could open a view of the source code. Using his code-writing skills, he would text me a block of code to insert into my draft. It is such a thrill when progress is made. I laughed out loud over the fact that we were pulling off our successes with him at home in the Cities, and me on a laptop in the sunroom at the lake. Alas, in the end, I had to settle for a compromise from my ideal when it became obvious that the host software was overriding our customizations at a certain point.
Now that I think on it, this isn’t much different than the battles I wage against the regular “upgrades” to my WordPress platform that are intended to make it easier to use but often end up preventing me from executing the preferred formatting I’ve been using for years. It’s tough being a dinosaur in today’s world.
[insert Tyrannosaurus rex roar here]
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Happily Ensconced
Barely suppressing feelings of undeservedness, I am happily ensconced in the sunroom of the lake house with the 9th and final stage of the Tour de France Femmes on my computer while hoards of hummingbirds dance around the two feeders hanging under the eaves.
I am well aware of how lucky I am to have a place like this; a world away from Nice, France, where the women bicycling athletes are waging a heroic battle in brutally extreme heat, climbing the same peak four times in a row in this last stage of the race, while I recline in the cool morning air overlooking the lake.
A good life, indeed.
A postcard experience, in fact. I’m having a wonderful time. Wish you were here!
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Leaving Early
I am departing at dawn this morning to dash home early from the “Golf Weekend” in order to then drive more than an hour west for Cyndie’s 50th high school reunion. They are starting with a boat cruise on Lake Minnetonka, then coming back to Eden Prairie for an “after party.”
The plan seems a little dizzying to me after my last two whirlwind days of activity and conversation with the regular crew of the annual weekend that Cyndie’s brothers host at the lake place.
Yesterday started a little rainy, but that didn’t stop the golfers.
I waited until late afternoon to head out on the bike with two other riders. We got dripped on a little bit, but returned to the house before it rained hard enough to get things wet. Nobody crashed, so that was a win.
Dinner was grilled meats, corn on the cob, and a few sides. Since they realized I would be leaving and would miss the big fish dinner tonight, they thawed a little fresh-caught Alaskan Salmon for me that Ben’s son, Beck, brought from his recent fishing trip.
More delicious food, keeping up a trend of good eats I’ve been feasting on lately. I’m not confident that I’ve done enough pedaling to justify my higher-than-normal calorie consumption of late.
I made a few more adjustments to my gear in a search to quiet my noisy bike. Putting the battery back on appears to have ended the annoying click I was experiencing in the vicinity of the bottom bracket, but that just made what seem like new squeaks extra irritating. I rode yesterday without my seat bag of road repair gear to see if that was adding to the squeakiness. It may have been better, but it wasn’t silent yet. My right shoe was doing some squeaking, so I’ve got a little tweaking to do there.
I think the problems might be a moving target that I’ll just have to learn to live with.
We ended the evening with a card game that involved dealing only one card to each individual. You just have to beat one other person, with the lowest card being the loser. Each guy started with three chips. The first person to lose three times and run out of chips gets to return to the game with one chip when play drops down to just three people left.
Last night, the person who earned that dubious honor came back to win the whole thing. It was highly entertaining.
The camaraderie is something I will miss, but I’m heading to a big night of visiting at Cyndie’s 50th reunion this afternoon and evening that I expect will fill the void nicely.
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Active Day
Yesterday started a little earlier than usual for us because the farrier was coming to trim the horses at 7:30. Asher was confused by us getting out the door so close to sunrise. We wanted the horses to be finished eating their servings of feed to avoid any unnecessary distractions by the time they were supposed to be cooperating with the farrier.
After I cleaned up all the manure (equine fecal relocation), I took Asher back to the house for his breakfast and ended up missing the entire trim appointment. Cyndie said that Light was very cooperative. That makes us really happy, because it hasn’t always been a sure thing with her. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been seeing a positive trend of willingness from Light in the last year.
Cyndie supported my decision to take my bike for a spin before heading up to the lake for a few days of her two brothers’ annual golf weekend. I’ve concluded that my bike is still noisy and now my new shoes squeak, too. That clicking is an issue that I’m tired of battling, so I may end up living with it. There are still one or two things I plan to test, so a tiny glimmer of hope remains.
The route I chose for my short romp ended up bringing me to a monster of a hill climb that had me in serious oxygen debt. It was so bad that I never fully recovered for the remainder of the ride. It didn’t help that the temperature was reaching the uncomfortably hot levels at the same time. When I finally reached home again, I was thoroughly pooped. I grabbed the pulse oximeter to see what my numbers were. Yikes! That explained why I felt so lousy.
The highlight of our day came at dinnertime. We picked up our neighbors on the north edge of Pierce County, Ann (Herzog) and David Drewiske, and headed to LoLo American Kitchen & Craft Bar in Hudson. David gave us a wonderful tour of back roads to avoid traffic caused by ongoing road construction. The menu at LoLo is laudable for the quality of every offering. I recommend it highly.
I ordered the Miso-Glazed Coho Salmon and Cyndie had the Grassfed Bavette Steak Frites. Yum!
We didn’t linger long after eating because I was about to make the drive north with my bike stowed safely in the back of my car.
I made it through dusk and into darkness without incident, arriving at the lake house a few minutes before 10 p.m.
The sky views transitioned from the orange setting sun to the orange rising moon over the duration of my drive, allowing me to wake up this morning at my favorite destination.
I plan to go for a little bike ride before all the golfers begin to arrive this afternoon. Tradition has it that we congregate at Angler’s Bar in Hayward for dinner Thursday. Hopefully, I’ll ride myself up a worthy appetite.
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Goodbye Cousins
We miss them already. Yesterday afternoon was a series of hugs, salutations, well wishes, and goodbyes as most of the folks departed for their homes or next destinations.
Pick a color. Any color. Cyndie’s twin cousins, Mike and Tom, appear in all their brilliance. A rare moment when they aren’t displaying their usual smiles or infectious laughter.
The morning brought opportunities for some heartfelt sharing, adding depth to connections bolstered by this rare occasion of spending multiple days together free from any official events demanding attention. Well, that is, beyond the fabulous meals that kept happening.
I began the day with an immediate question for Cyndie when she woke up. Had she heard the dramatic clap of thunder from a lightning bolt that must have struck very close during the night? The flash was so bright that the pink glow that filled the window was apparent through my closed eyelids.
It became suspicious when she reported not hearing a thing, and I saw that surfaces out the window showed no evidence of it having rained. I checked with a few other people as the morning went on, but nobody had heard such a thing. Could it have been something I dreamed? It was so real to me.
When I mentioned it to Heather’s husband, John, a meteorologist, he pointed me to lightningmaps.org, where I could look at strikes in the last 24 hours.
There was no lightning strike for miles. What an amazing dream experience I’d had.
Cyndie and I finished off the last night of our long weekend with a couple of rounds of Hollywood Rummy with Sara and Althea. I enjoyed no luck.
This morning, we will pack up and head for home. I will only have a couple of days to ensure everything is ready for visitors on Thursday. Cyndie has invited folks from one of her drawing classes to come explore the views for inspiration toward their next works of art.
I plan to depart that day for a return to the lake, this time with my bike. It’s the annual golf (and biking) weekend hosted by Cyndie’s brothers, Steve and Ben. I will be accompanying any of the guys who want to mix in a ride after swinging the clubs.
It’s a tough job, but it’s what friends do.
