Posts Tagged ‘Paddock Lake’
Showing Age
It feels like a Saturday morning around here, for no obvious reason, especially since weekend days are rarely different than the rest of the week for us now that we have no employment responsibilities. The weather, the horses, the music we put on during breakfast; they all influence in some way, but I suspect it is something deeper in my unconscious.
I composed an email yesterday to kick off planning for my high school class’s 50th reunion next year. Funny, how it triggers recollections and reminisces of people and places from so many decades ago, even as I carry on with my current routines, tending to our property and animals with hands that look like an old man’s.
My long-term effort to use the winter accumulation of manure in the paddocks to create a rise over a drain tile is coming along nicely.
The horses haven’t paid much attention to it lately. Some years, there has been a lot more evidence of them messing around along the edges of the pile. I look forward to them doing that to break up the dried manure that rolls to the bottom, to mix it into the existing, predominantly clay, soil.
We are in a bit of a dry spell that has finally put an end to standing water in the low spots of our trails through the woods. It has also dried up Paddock Lake.
The horses have been working on expanding the borders by their antics of stomping and kicking around to get back up after they lie down in it. Their interest in it seems to disappear as fast as the water does.
They reached a fresh level of shedding over the last couple of days. This morning, we watched Mia pushing her butt so hard against the almost completely dead willow tree that it looked like it was going to topple over. She succeeded in scraping out massive clumps of hair.
A wild turkey gobbled in the distance, and the sun popped out for a few seconds between a sky full of thick clouds. The day seems like a Saturday with a mostly open agenda. A guy could go for a bike ride if he didn’t have a log home guy stopping by at some undetermined time to quote a wood maintenance project. Both the logs of the house and the log-looking siding on the shop garage are showing their age.
I can totally relate.
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Muddy Mia
In the middle of my housekeeping task under the barn overhang yesterday afternoon, I suddenly heard great splashing sounds. I had to step around the three horses surrounding me to see what was going on. It was Mia. She decided to go swimming in Paddock Lake before their dinner.
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She came right up afterwards, but oddly showed no patience for eating feed out of a bucket. She wandered out into the back pasture. She has always been sort of the odd horse out of the herd, but lately, Mia is behaving like quite the loner. The other three appear to be just fine with that and show little stress over her frequent solo departures.
I left her bucket hanging in the usual spot and went about my business. Eventually, I spotted her back to have a bite or two, but she didn’t stay. It has me missing the days when they voraciously gobbled every last morsel of their servings. There is something unsettling about animals choosing not to eat food served to them.
Mia’s mud bath appears to be just the beginning of the messiness awaiting us in the days ahead. We’ve enjoyed two days without new precipitation, and while many areas are wetter than ever, the high ground shows a hint of drying out.
I’ve grown fond of being able to see where we are stepping on walks recently, but the next few days look like the ground could be covered with snow again. Slushy snow, one source predicts. That hint of drying out will soon be a thing of the past.
Oh, joy.
Look at that! John is showing signs of losing his passion for all things snow-related.
I must be getting old.
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Ice Outed
The persistent puddle that I light-heartedly refer to as “Paddock Lake” is ice-free this morning. I’m afraid that judges were unable to conclude whether the ice-out date was March 6 or March 7 due to the dangerous lightning conditions last night, keeping intelligent people indoors during the thunderstorm that rolled through.
At 11:21 a.m. yesterday, it looked like this:
I found Swings and Light soaking wet when I came out, so I gave the puddle a closer inspection and discovered evidence that they had been playing their splashing game. Surprisingly, they hadn’t destroyed all the ice.
By 4:35 p.m., it looked like this:
The silt the horses had stirred up had yet to settle out, but it was an overcast day, leaving plenty of ice still visible.
I don’t know how much rain fell with the storm that arrived around 10:30 p.m., but it was audible on the roof and left things wet this morning. By the time I dragged myself out of bed to walk Asher, light snow was beginning to fall.
At 7:31 a.m., this is what I found:
While we were down at the barn, the snow got so heavy that we received an inch in less than half an hour.
The ice is gone, but now snow is covering everything again. It won’t last long. The forecast indicates we could reach 60°F tomorrow. Spring-like weather around these parts.
Anyone want to guess when we will lose another tree due to violent weather? Michigan sure got a gut punch yesterday with the surprisingly early tornado this far north. The storm chasers had their eyes on Texas and Oklahoma.
It gives me an uneasy feeling about the odds of increasingly intense storms unleashing damage to our paradise.
Every day that we escape negative impacts is a blessing to be celebrated. The quick March snowstorm this morning was rather adorable.
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Some Miscellany
On our morning exploration through the woods yesterday, one of our weird trees caught my eye. It’s kind of hard to photograph, but I tried anyway.
There is a tree right behind it that complicates the view, but if you focus on the closest large trunk, you will find that it snapped off, but a limb pointed toward the ground did a 180 and started growing upwards.
It’s gotten tall enough to compete for sunlight in the overhead canopy. I can’t imagine the success of that wild U-turn growth is going to last indefinitely. Try to picture if it could live long enough that the trunk of the post-incident growth grew as wide as the base portion.
Trees can do some amazing things. Not that I’m still bitter about it… Well, yeah, I’m still bitter that the maple tree I transplanted into the center of the labyrinth gave up without warning after 7 years of promising growth. Why couldn’t it have shown the fight to survive that this tree exhibits?
The big barn doors were frozen solid again yesterday morning, but I wrestled them loose once more around noon, and the delivery of feed happened about an hour later.
When Asher and I arrived to work on the doors, I had left the small door open to indicate we were expecting the driver. Inside, we surprised a pigeon and a squirrel that had taken advantage of the opening.
I didn’t see the pigeon’s exit, but I saw the squirrel trying to hide way up high in the eaves. Poor Asher whined over knowing it was there but not being able to do anything about it.
When the delivery arrived, I left Asher in the house, and when I got to the barn, it appeared empty of intruders.
I paused to capture the state of melting ice on Paddock Lake in the afternoon. I’ll be surprised if it lasts two more days at the temperatures we are enjoying lately.
The horses will likely be holding a splashing party very soon.
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Guess Contest
Despite what the two words, “ice” and “out,” have come to mean in 2026 with respect to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, used together, these words have long had a different connotation in places where winter resembles Arctic conditions that last for many months.
For many lake communities, the question of when a lake will become ice-free has launched a time-honored tradition of friendly wagers on predicting the exact date. Thus, I have decided to open a contest for you, my dear readers, to guess the exact date of ice-out on Paddock Lake in 2026.
This photo shows the ice’s condition as of yesterday morning. It was frozen solid. Mia was already making close observations toward settling on her best guess. You will have to rely on what you can deduce from the image.
Here are the Contest Rules, as determined by a committee consisting entirely of unbiased representatives of Wintervale Ranch. In other words, me:
- Your guess must be submitted in whatever way works best for you and your level of connection with blogger, *this* John W. Hays. That may include an email, a text, a comment on today’s post, or telepathy, if you think I can be trusted to receive it. Don’t count on that.
- Comments on this post should include your initials, nickname, or some unique identifier of your choosing since unfamiliar commenters show up to me as “anonymous.”
- To be as fair as possible (and as a reward to contestants who are regular daily readers), your guess should arrive to me before the end of the day today, March 3rd. If you only miss by a small amount of time, go ahead and guess anyway. The judge may allow it in the case that nobody else has chosen to participate.
- In the event of a duplicate date being guessed, the first one to pick said date will be granted an advantage. However, there remains the possibility that I might split the prize if the situation seems warranted.
- Sour grapes are considered bad form, so if the horses choose to mess with the lake before ice out is declared by the judge, no complaints will be tolerated. Plus, such action by the paddock dwellers could possibly help some guesses. Did you consider that?
- Any rules that have been overlooked will be left to the whims of Mother Nature to ignore as she sees fit.
In the event that anyone actually bothers to guess, and if a guess of the exact date is successfully submitted, this contest is prepared to offer the following as a prize:
The winner will be awarded a custom word painting of vague length that may loosely resemble some manner of prose frequently referred to as a poem, ode, or rambling free verse creative writing that will somewhere within, somehow contain four words submitted by the person who guessed the correct date.
If a tie is deemed permissible, each person will be submitting two words to be combined in the victory verse composition.
The following context is being provided for consideration while deciding on your guess:
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Fourteenth November
We are in our fourteenth November on these twenty acres and marveling over the thought that we have been tending these fields and forests for that long. Thinking back to when we first arrived, one particular vivid memory stays fresh in my mind. The very first time I ventured off-trail in our woods, I came upon the fresh, blood-red skeleton of an 8-point buck in a circle of hair and paw prints.
We had heard the excited yips of a pack of coyotes during the night a week before that, but didn’t realize how close to our house they were or what the ruckus actually meant. We’ve heard similar howling packs over the years since, sometimes triggered by an emergency vehicle siren, but haven’t come upon any similarly obvious evidence on our land like that carcass.
A stray bone is not uncommon, though.
Cyndie recently trained me in recognizing the invasive garlic mustard plant she has worked for years to disrupt, and we spent some time during an afternoon last week pulling sprouts in the areas off-trail that are less obvious. I found it a little overwhelming because it seems to be everywhere. We did what we could until my ability to cope was exhausted.
I can see why she just makes it a habit to pull whatever catches her eye when on our walks. She stuffs her pockets with plastic shopping bags to always have a way to bag and dispose of what she pulls up, an essential step in eradicating the highly destructive invasive.
There was a tiny oak sprout that caught my attention, barely tall enough to stand above the dead leaf blanket covering the ground in November. The leaves were so perfect. Apparently, too young to keep up with all the bigger trees that have the fall routine figured out.
It looks like today’s precipitation is sliding to our south, which is both good and bad. It’s nice that the horses will get a break from needing to deal with wetness in these cold temperatures. Their natural winter coats are coming in nicely, but their shaggy look quickly flattens out in the rain or wet snow.
The bad part of missing out on some rain or snow is that Paddock Lake is dry and will make for lousy skating this year. The residual growth was almost fluorescent green in the low spots.
My footprint was a result of retrieving the horses’ Jolly Ball that had rolled into the middle of the muddy remains of the “lake.” It’s always interesting to find the ball has been relocated from the spots where I place it, handle up, in hopes of enticing them to play.
We rarely have the privilege of catching them in the act. Occasionally, the ball disappears from the paddock. When it happened one time when the hay field grass was tall, we didn’t find it until the hay mower had sliced into it.
Fourteen Novembers of wonder and joy.
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More Splashin’
If there was ever any question about how Paddock Lake seems to keep getting deeper and deeper over time, the following video provides a pretty clear demonstration of what it’s like when the horses decide to play in the water.
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When we first heard the ruckus, all three of Mia, Light, and Swings were kicking at the water at the same time. That was quite a sight. By the time Cyndie was able to pull out her phone to record the action, Swings and Mia were yielding their time to Light.
Light went at it with gusto. I am curious about whether she was trying to accomplish anything or just splashing for the sake of splashing. She certainly was achieving at least that much.
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Politispam Inundation
Our poor phones and the mailbox have been working overtime lately due to a spring election in the state of Wisconsin. Apparently, the safety and sanctity of the entire country hinges on our votes for the next judge added to our state supreme court. It’s not just our friends and neighbors weighing in on what would be good for the state; it is a variety of national political endorsing organizations that fervently need their patsy to gain a position of power to swing this state and thus the entire country in the direction they need to further their agendas.
Man, I miss the days when judges’ biases were just a little bit harder to discern. There’s probably an argument for the exposure being more valuable to help us make our decisions when it comes time to elect a judge. However, when needing to hide their bias, it was harder to make obvious judgments that would out them.
In this day and age, it seems hiding misbehaviors is no longer necessary. If a judge were to accept expensive trips on yachts and any other number of special favors, you’d expect there to be consequences. Hello, Clarence Thomas. How are things working out for you? No problem.
According to the voice and text messages popping on my phone by the hour and the flyers coming by snail mail, I should be very afraid.
I am afraid. I’m afraid it’s too late. We’ll vote, but I believe it’s too little, too late. In all honestly, I don’t feel surviving for four years of the current President and his minions will bring us out of the current disaster unfolding.
What little hope I hold is that we can continue to maintain our little sanctuary space on 20 small acres of beautiful land where I will continue to welcome anyone who suffers oppression from the current regime a chance to hide and cope.
They may not get a chance to enjoy Paddock Lake during dry spells, though. That last snowstorm that passed south of us and left us high and dry has contributed to the disappearance of water in the lake today. It is becoming a reasonable gauge I will refer to in determining how dry the land around here has become.
I guess I will welcome the rain that is forecast for overnight tonight.
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Bathing Again
Yesterday morning, I took a picture of Paddock Lake because I liked the patterns on the frozen surface that were glistening in the sun.
In the afternoon, when I stopped by for a visit with the lovely beasts, I noticed Swings’ coat was wavy to a degree that would trigger jealousy in a lot of women I know.
It was pretty obvious to me that Swings and Light had recently been swimming and the only logical place to do that would be down at the lake. I walked down to check it out.
Sure enough, there was a lot less water in the crater, and there were enough fresh hoof prints that my suspicion was confirmed. There had been some splish splashin’ goin’ on!
It seems to me that splashing around in the water would be more likely to occur on a hot summer day, but I’m not gonna argue with the grooming choices these horses make. It occurred to me that there are probably horses whose owners would never let them get this muddy. Our mares have a lot of autonomy when it comes to grooming.
We offer to clean the mud off of them with a brush, but it is rare for them to accept. What amazes me is how often I show up and discover their coats looking clean and smooth without any help from us. They obviously know how to take care of themselves.
One thing that I have found to require an assist from us is detangling the “fairy knots” that show up in their manes. Or, more accurately, Mia’s mane. She is the one most prone to developing them.
The person who has been our handler from This Old Horse ever since the herd arrived has shared that she will be leaving the organization. This afternoon, she is bringing her replacement over to meet me and the horses. Cyndie will have already departed for the airport by the time they are planning to get here.
I’m sure the horses will have themselves looking their very best for the occasion.
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Ice Out
When we arrived to feed the horses yesterday afternoon, I spotted Mia covered in soaking wet black slop. It appears she had just been swimming in Paddock Lake. The ice hadn’t even completely melted yet! Just two mornings ago, I spotted a couple of pigeons skating on the frozen surface.
Maybe the weight of the birds started cracking the ice up in advance of Mia’s arrival.
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On another topic, on Saturday night, Cyndie and I dipped our toes back into the real world by viewing a current live episode of SNL, despite knowing it would likely involve mention of he whom I wish to avoid at all times. Besides the cold open skit mocking the behaviors in the disrespectful meeting with President Zelenskyy, the Weekend Update news section included a short clip of the real meeting.
The only reason I am bringing this up is because I was alerted to a petition collecting signatures on an open letter of apology to the Ukrainian President expressing the embarrassment of American citizens for (my words:) [the actions of the weaklings who behave like schoolboy bullies]. If you are embarrassed as well, I invite you to join me and add your name to the tens of thousands of others who already have signed:
To President Zelenskyy, From Embarrassed Americans
I want nothing as much as I want to be recognized as an American who has no association whatsoever with the current (so-called) leaders of our country.
Heck, as long as I’m on the subject, I would like to apologize to Canada for anything and everything related to the same thuggish buffoons aforementioned.
It is a really great time to be on an expedition into the wilderness without constant contact with the real world.
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Relative Something 