Posts Tagged ‘modern convenience’
For Granted
My perspectives of our surroundings have shifted back in time due to my frequent visits of late to archives of local newspapers published in the 1860s/70s. When I pedal my bike past farms, I find myself thinking about the first family to start clearing that land and how the surroundings must have looked in their eyes.
While having breakfast beside the raging Cannon River last Thursday, I tried to imagine what impression that threatening-looking torrent would have presented to people in a time when there were no bridges.
It occurred to me how much I take for granted the ease with which we traverse rivers now.
Think about immigrants who found life so difficult where they lived that they would cross an ocean with what little they could carry seeking new opportunities. Somehow, they make their way across half the North American Continent to a frontier with little infrastructure and come to a river that looks like this one.
They’d already accomplished heroic feats to make it so far, I marvel over how anyone could maintain sanity in the face of each new challenge.
If I get hungry, I walk to our refrigerator or look in a cupboard for instant gratification. If the weather is bad, I close windows, shut doors, and adjust the comfort level on our thermostat.
For every gripe I come up with about modern life, there are innumerable conveniences I am taking for granted.
My big plans for getting in some hours on my bike and using our trimmers to reclaim our trails from overgrowth yesterday did not come to fruition. As the wind shoved my car all over the road on our way to a brunch date in Edina, I appreciated that I wasn’t trying to push my bike pedals into the gales. We returned home with plenty of time to tackle any morsel of the much-needed trimming.
I opted for a nap in my hammock instead. I’m not convinced my body isn’t still working on clearing out the remnants of viral invaders.
One thing I don’t take for granted is the luxury I enjoy in choosing how and when to work on our never-ending “to-do” list in maintaining our property and when I’d prefer to rest instead.
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Playing Plumber
Picking up where things left off Saturday night, I started Sunday with a trip to Hudson to pick up the new kitchen faucet fixtures I bought online the night before. Around twelve hours after discovering the problem of dripping water beneath the sink, I was driving home with the solution in my possession. What a luxury to have such easy access to the specific items we seek. 
For all the times I grump about the problems related to over-consumerism in society, I do benefit from the conveniences offered.
However, despite all the benefits of readily available goods, the faucet still didn’t install itself. This morning my body is a little stiff and sore from playing plumber for the hours spent figuring out how to dismantle the old leaky parts and then reversing the process to install the new set.
Much to my great satisfaction, the details of this plumbing project were all within my ability to deduce and execute, despite having little experience with plumbing.
Twice, I was able to get a little extra practice by doing things over after discovering I had made errors. The whole time I was working on this project, I thought the line with the drippy shutoff valve was the cold water supply, so when I did the initial flow test, I discovered I’d connected the lines wrong.
Easy to fix, so with only that single trip to the hardware store, I completed the sink project in time for lunch.
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That left me the afternoon to suffer clearing some of the most un-fun snow ever that was the result of Saturday’s rain and the following flakes that relentlessly continued to blow across our land off and on since.
Both shovel and plow were only half a match for the underlayer of frozen crunch that sometimes popped free with ease, but more often stayed welded to the ground below. Trying to clean it all up was a relatively thankless task, which made it easy to retreat from the battle after a minimum effort and seek a few moments of chill in the easy chair before Sunday was completely over.
I thoroughly enjoyed washing my hands at the kitchen sink when I got in.
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Modern Convenience
It was sunny and 60-some degrees at our place yesterday. If it weren’t for the modern convenience of accurate weather forecasting giving us several days warning of an impending snowstorm, I would be completely clueless about what is headed our way. By Friday morning, the view of our property won’t look like this again for a while.
I will not be surprised if the alignment of the storm moving in this evening brings us around a foot of snow, based on the models published by the weather services.
Such a significant contrast of weather in just over a day is something I would not be able to comprehend happening without the present day wisdom, and data gleaned from satellites and radar images. My intuitive senses for interpreting the weather are far too dull to perceive that the warm sunshine yesterday afternoon was so quickly going to become a distant memory.
At the same time, it is still February, after all. It’s supposed to be wintery weather. So I am well prepared for whatever cold and blowing snow may arrive. I have my special leg warmer to keep me comfortable while chronicling the brutal challenges I face when plowing and shoveling the oodles of snowflakes inbound on our position.
Pequenita seems to like napping on my legs when I stretch out. It’s cute, but can’t be all that comfortable for her, and it tends to lock down my posture long enough that numbness sets in.
Maybe she is sensing the oncoming storm and wants to keep me safe and warm in preparation for doing battle when it comes time to dig out.
In the mean time, I hope to spend most of the day Friday in front of a warm fire, watching the flakes fly outside the windows.
See ya later, warm sunshine.
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Relative Something 