Posts Tagged ‘pets’
Lovely Feast
On the Sunday Christians celebrate Easter, Cyndie likes to shower her family with love in the form of food she spends days preparing. It was as delicious as ever. This year, she also made customized Easter cards for everyone, adorned with a variety of creative bunny faces (plus one bunny tail), which she hand-painted using colorful acrylic paints.
Having so many people to cuddle and beg for scratches is normally to Asher’s delight, but yesterday was a little challenging for him. Steve and Jessica brought their little dog, Vern, for the visit. I would describe Asher’s behavior as ‘tentatively tolerating’ in the presence of the highly active intruder who showed up in his space.
They coexisted, but didn’t become fast friends. It was actually the second time they had met, although that was many months ago. Their interactions then were pretty cute, but Vern was more of an oblivious puppy at the time, and Asher seemed to accept that nothing about him was a threat. Yesterday, Vern was more interested in Asher’s undercarriage, and that pushed Asher to become a little more wary of his presence.
Our big boy has convinced us that he has outgrown sleeping in his crate overnight. He curls up just fine in there, but he can’t fully stretch out when he wants to. A few nights of repeated (uncharacteristic) whining was all it took to earn him the privilege of now sleeping on the floor at the foot of our bed. He luxuriously stretches to his fullest extent between periods of curling up like a sled dog hiding in a snowstorm.
The photo above shows Asher keeping Cyndie company while she was painting bunnies in our den. He is neither curled up nor stretched out on the bed in that image.
It really was a lovely feast yesterday; however, the fact that Cyndie shows her love by feeding people special treats is beginning to overwhelm my limited willpower to resist. I ate way more of the foods that aren’t on my healthy diet plan than I should have. Calories consumed have not been balanced with calories burned for too many months in a row.
It’s great to be loved this much, but I am not a fan of the expanding inches of my middle.
I wonder if I could rig up a contraption so that her oven is powered by me pedaling a stationary bike. Those darn lemon or vanilla-frosted buttery biscuit cookies she just made are killers for my former ability to stop at just one. I am powerless to resist.
There is so much love in every bite, I bet these cookies could stop a war.
.
.
Distributing Treats
We thought the rain would arrive during the afternoon yesterday based on the radar scans, but it didn’t start falling until well after dark. In the middle of the afternoon, we made a special trip to the barn to team up on putting rain sheets on the horses. To my surprise, Mia didn’t move away as we were covering the other three while plying them with treats.
Since she was right there, I tossed a lead rope over her neck and offered her a few treat bites, while Cyndie quickly wrangled a sheet over her back. Mia was doing fine, but there were leg straps on the back that Cyndie didn’t want to bother Mia with, so she was trying to knot them up to keep them from dragging. While she was doing that, the other horses started to crowd us, hoping for more treats.
We ended up in bad positioning, and Mix decided to lash out at Mia with a kick. That riled us up, and things got a little chaotic as Cyndie and I took turns chastising Mix while trying to calm all the others and not lose the progress on getting Mia’s sheet fully buckled.
It never pays to take shortcuts. We really should have staged them on separate sides before starting, but having them all standing together made it tempting to go for it before any of them had time to reject the idea. In the end, we got them all covered in advance of the cold and wet conditions that could last for the next few days.
Cyndie saw a video of a homemade indoor activity challenge that we thought Asher would go for, so we collected the pieces and strung them up yesterday.
His favorite toy of late is a ball that we put some of his dry food in for him to roll around until individual bites fall out from all the gyrating. We thought he would surely get excited to flip the cups and bottles on a string to gobble up all the pieces that drop out.
Well, he showed little interest in having anything to do with this plastic trash that he knows is off-limits when it is in the recycle bin. I thought it was good that he could see the treats at the bottom, but he’d probably like it more if they were painted bright orange to look more like dog toys similar to his ball.
He doesn’t need to see the food inside them; he knew what was in there from across the room because he could smell it. He simply wanted those enticing tidbits to be in his orange ball, the way he likes it.
.
.
Overlapping Naps
Asher and I headed down to the barn mid-morning to retrieve the feed buckets and clean up any fresh messes under the overhang. The first thing I noticed when we stepped out of the house was Mia standing all alone in the round pen. We found the other three horses huddled together on one side of the overhang, positioned so the warm sunshine was covering one full side of each of them.
It was a normal hour for them to be napping, and they appeared to be all in at the moment. Mix really should have found a spot to lie down, because she was ridiculously close to toppling to the ground. Her head sagged lower and lower as her slumber deepened, until it almost touched the ground, and her back legs buckled, jarring her awake for an instant.
When I finished cleaning up around them, I opened the back door of the barn for Asher to lead us on an agenda-less walk. He slowly made his way past the old chicken coop until we were parallel with Mia in the round pen.
There, he sat down to survey the distance for activity, so I sat down beside him. This is one of my great joys of retirement. There was nowhere else I needed to be and nothing else I needed to do in that moment. When Asher eventually lay down, I did, too. I placed a hand on his back and closed my eyes. If I fell asleep and he moved, I hoped I would notice.
I didn’t feel myself falling asleep, but when some sounds and movement suddenly brought me back to consciousness, I could tell I had dozed off. The sound that woke me was Mix arriving and posturing to lie down just on the other side of the fence beside us. She must have gotten fed up with almost falling over. Beyond Mix, I noticed that Mia had already lain down to nap inside the round pen.
It was a wonderfully idyllic scene, the four of us all napping together, except that when Mix lay down, she rolled on her back and rubbed her face and sides on the grass before settling, and those gyrations happening so close to us brought Asher to his feet to observe the spectacle more closely.
I wanted the horses to be able to enjoy a moment of deep sleep on the ground, so to give them more space, I got up with Asher and invited him to continue our meandering stroll around the property.
It was okay that we didn’t get to linger there with them. I was tickled that Mix had shown up to join us while we were snoozing. We were doing overlapping naps.
The horses don’t stay on the ground very long, anyway. As Asher and I followed the back pasture fence line around past the labyrinth, I could see that Swings had come to the far side of the paddock to join in the ground napping, but Mix had already returned to her feet.
Midday napping in the warm spring sunshine is a luxury not to be passed up when the forecast for the next 4 days is filled with threats of cold air and a freezing mix of precipitation.
Of course, Asher and I will simply move our overlapping naps indoors until winter finishes with its latest unnecessary after-the-fact tantrum.
.
.
Dog Tired
He did it to me again. That’s two days in a row. Asher took off when I wasn’t looking and disappeared beyond the range (I’m assuming) of my ability to persuade him with the electronic collar. They should have a setting where the collar automatically starts vibrating when your pet gets a certain distance away from the controller.
For some reason, on Sunday, I grabbed the mailbox off its base when plowing the driveway, and I left it in the shop garage. There would be no mail delivery, so I took it off with a plan to replace it after the township plow cleared the road.
As Asher and I headed out for a walk yesterday morning, I took him to the shop garage to get the mailbox. The garage door button is inside the shop, and I stepped inside to close it. When I came out, Asher was nowhere in sight. I thought he had gotten trapped inside the garage when I lowered the door, so I opened it back up.
Nope. He was gone. I grabbed the mailbox and started hustling my way down the driveway when my phone rang. It was our closest neighbor, Eileen, who lives on the other side of 650th St, reporting that Asher was at her place. At least that was closer than a mile down the road, and this time my forced march to retrieve him was all on plowed surfaces. Still, that’s more walking under stress than I wanted to be doing.
On his second walk of the day, Asher was confined to a leash. When we got to the end of the driveway, I discovered the plow had come by a second time and filled the end of the driveway, and also knocked the mailbox into the ditch as it passed. So much for my bright idea the day before.
Under protests from Asher, I tied his leash to the hay shed to give him a grand vista to enjoy while I went to get the Grizzly to clean up the end of the driveway. Unfortunately, the ATV wouldn’t start. I guessed I might have flooded it using the choke to entice it to fire, so I left it to sit and did some shoveling by hand.
First order of business was to clear a path out of the back of the barn so I could dump manure. The mess around the overhang was about to get out of control, and the wheelbarrow was already full because I didn’t have that pathway cleared to dump it.
That should have been enough time for the flooded cylinders to clear, but I still couldn’t get it to fire. That left me carrying a shovel to the end of the driveway to heave scoops of the mess by hand until I had enough of an opening for Cyndie’s car to fit through.
I ended the day exhausted and muscle-sore. And tired of the dog. But a solution to my dog concerns arrived last night when Cyndie successfully returned from Florida. She had tennis shoes on when she walked in the door, and it looked so funny to me.
She will be back in winter boots today!
.
.
Snowstorm Underway
As of this morning, I would say the weather service delivered accurate warnings about this “historic” winter storm. Unfortunately, Asher decided the snow gave him freedom to do whatever he pleased, leading me on a near heart attack march through the deep drifts, following his tracks up 650th St. to convince him to get to the barn, “NOW!”
Not sure if his e-collar was not tight enough or if he had gotten out of range, but it is now much tighter and set to a higher level of getting his attention and cooperation.
Before he disappeared on me, I paused to take a picture of the drift off the roof.
Down the hill in the woods, I saw him stop to poop. After a few steps of trudging through the snow somewhere near where our trail should have been, I looked for his fluorescent orange vest and couldn’t find it. Hustling through the deep snow to find his tracks, I could see he was off on a leaping run and never spied him again until I had huffed and puffed my way across most of our acres to the road. Then it took cresting the hill to the north and spotting him a mile ahead of me. It was so far that I struggled to identify whether he was still moving away from me or coming back.
It took losing sight of him behind a rise in the road to figure it out.
The horses are coping the way horses do. I don’t know if they experience regret, but I hope Mia is cognizant of how hard I was pleading with her to accept a cover before the storm arrived.
Sadly, the wind direction at the start of the snow was from the east and blew right under the overhang. It has switched now, so they at least have that level of relief from the blizzard.
Now I’m headed out to see if I can put a mid-storm dent in the drifts over the driveway with my Yamaha Grizzly 660.
This is one instance when I will have no problem allowing “good enough” to prevail over the usual target of perfection.
.
.
Dizzying Dissonance
The firehose of ridiculousness and the horrific is flowing at a dizzying rate from one main point in the country of the USA. The buffoon acting as the figurehead is busy spouting his aggressive desires to take over other countries and much of our own, by force if necessary, while simultaneously claiming himself to be the most peaceful person to ever deserve a peace prize.
It is so comical while being equally evil that the rest of the sane world seems to just stare, dumbstruck, wondering what the heck could possibly happen next to stop the madness.
Those who made this mess have no interest in stopping anything. As with so many realities of this world, it will likely get worse before things end up better.
Cyndie and I romp on our beautiful rural acres with our dog and horses, enjoying what diminishing features of winter remain. Rain in January has become the new normal for our position on the planet at this point in the warming climate. Asher behaves as if he doesn’t have a clue about the evil in motion in the world. His pure joy of chasing his rope-pierced Jolly Ball is a healing balm for our fractured sensibilities.
The horses, on the other hand, give off a different vibe. From everything we have come to know about the far-reaching sentience of these amazing equine beings, it doesn’t surprise me that they recognize the nastiness that humans are spewing into the world (again).
It means a lot to Cyndie and me to be able to give them our love and attention each day, letting them know we understand when they are uneasy. Having been rescued from some truly dire situations, our four horses are well familiar with what humans are capable of when acting at their worst. Every good thing we can do for them helps to heal whatever previous suffering they have endured in their lives.
The best thing we can do for ourselves amid the dizzying dissonance of the transition to an authoritarian state is to avoid the blasts from automated bots working for the propaganda machine and increase our loving attention to each other, our children, our friends, our neighbors, and all the animals in our care.
The little things we do matter in ways that too often get overlooked. As individuals, we can’t solve the threat of ICE agents murdering citizens, but we can help each other to cope with the storm of hatred rumbling over the country (and world).
Give a little extra love to people you encounter every day. Share a smile with someone you’ve never met. Give rise to a feeling of love for yourself and everyone you know.
The human race is so much better than the way the worst of people can make us all seem. Two different things can be true at the same time. It’s dizzying, I know.
I’m thinking about going outside to hug some of our trees. Then I’ll go retrieve the empty feed buckets from the horses on this picturesque Saturday morning.
.
.
Predatory Behavior
Last Sunday, we were blessed with a visit from our kids for one last day of mirth before the return to regularly scheduled programming of the work world in 2026. The weather was a bit of a risk as we were under a warning for sleet and freezing rain. They braved the drive anyway, with utmost caution, and the weather didn’t turn out to be as bad as it could have been.
As soon as they headed home and Cyndie and I went down to tend to the horses, the murky sky opened up a bit for a sweet show at sunset.
Two days later, we received what I feel is the worst weather for winter: rain. Once again, the snow is a saturated mess. I took Asher for an afternoon explore, and he fixated on a dead tree trunk that he seemed certain contained a rodent snack.
I stood waiting while he worked furiously to gain access. Seeing him so harmlessly entertained is a reward worth allowing to play out uninterrupted, so I busied myself with tamping down the wet snow where I stood.
He showed no sign of giving up and began to attack the little trees in the immediate vicinity that were getting in his way. They served to fulfill his urge to chomp on things better than any of the artificial chew toys in his extensive collection in the house.
He worked on that effort for so long, my project of tamping snow grew to create a raised median at the intersection of the two trails where he was busy at it.
As much as I wished to let him play to his heart’s content, his distraction had lasted so long that it became time to feed the horses, and I was forced to call him off. We trundled away through the snow slurry toward the barn after a minor struggle to redirect his attention away from the prize he never reached.
If there was a mouse in there, I wonder what its experience was like during the onslaught. Did it assume there was an earthquake, or did it sense the telltale signs of a predator at its door?
I think I can relate to what it must have been like inside that hollow section of the tree limb. That is what it feels like every day for citizens of the United States under the criminal control of the current administration. If only there were someone who could call off the brutal regime and send them on their way.
That terrorized critter suffered for less than an hour. Our suffering shows no signs of abating.
To the rest of the world: I’m sorry you have to witness this, or worse yet, be directly impacted by the actions of the disgusting few who are systematically dismantling our country for their personal gain.
.
.
Wonder Dog
Before I get to today’s post, I want to proclaim that I unequivocally object to everything the current U.S. criminal masquerading as a leader is up to, as well as all of the rest of the people in positions of power, who are allowing things to happen. It is soul-crushing and heartbreaking.
Our New Year’s getaway to Mike and Barb’s cabin was not entirely for Asher’s benefit, but he did seem to receive the bulk of everyone’s attention while we’ve been here. On a walk through the woods along a portage from Bluewater Lake to Trout Lake, we paused to let Asher zoom on the snow-covered ice.
He is enthralled with the scent he picks up from the deer tracks in the snow and would gladly follow them endlessly if we allowed. A gnome home in the trunk of a tree didn’t even get a sniff from him, probably because it looks like they must have traveled south for the winter.
No one is shoveling their entrance.
The extreme cold has softened, and it is pleasant to be out enjoying winter at its best. We’ve received fresh fallen snow each day, which is keeping everything white and making it look like we are playing in a snow globe.
As darkness fell, we heard the pop of a fireworks shot down the lake, which Barb and Mike knew indicated their neighbors were going to do a show of multiple shots soon. With a full moon peaking through the light cloud cover, we decided to walk down to the lake to watch.
Since Asher had never shown any reaction to gunshots or thunderclaps, we decided to test his reaction to the fireworks.
Our mistake was in assuming he would be as oblivious to them as he is to the other loud booms. The poor guy flipped out. Our 90-pound puppy went into a full-on panic of yelping and trying to drag me as fast as he could, and as far away as he could get.
We have confirmed our wonder dog’s kryoptonite.
Lesson learned, the hard way. This morning, Asher woke up as happy as ever, and he and I had a wonderful walk at dawn, leaving last night’s terror a memory we hope he won’t need to relive. In a short time, we will pack him up along with our bags and leftover food and head for home.
It’s been a fabulous visit. I expect it will also be fabulous to get him back to our usual routine at home, where he can be the wonder dog who barks at delivery trucks and rabbits in his yard.
.
.
Great Adventures
Our first day of the new year up in the north woods was pure joy for Asher and us. The big pup got a lot of love from Mike, here shown gently accepting a treat:
We have been eating the most delicious and festive of foods prepared by Barb and Cyndie, with Mike adding his artistry in a variety of ways, including these wonderful appetizers:
When we weren’t busy eating, we were outside giving Asher a chance to explore the woods around the cabin. He was a good sport about staying in contact with us when we let him wander a little bit to follow the obvious deer tracks in the snow.
Mike dug through a closet of dog toys accumulated over the years and came up with a chew toy for Asher. Our hound gnawed on it for a little while, but then began pacing the cabin, looking for a place to bury it. I let him take it outside with us, and he immediately hunted for somewhere he could bury it in the snow.
Before we made our way back indoors, I snuck over and retrieved the “bone” and brought it back in with us.
He soon lost interest in it and moved on to other distractions, including barking at things out the window that none of the rest of us could perceive.
When we weren’t outside enjoying walks in the perfect falling snow, Barb and I ripped through a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle, while Cyndie made short work of a cribbage match with Mike. We played a couple of other games, listened to an episode of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, and watched a movie that was wrongly identified as a “comedy.”
You know, ‘at-the-lake’ activities.
My daily routine has been knocked for a loop without our usual twice-a-day horse-feeding detail, demonstrated by my confused and entirely incorrect exclamation that it was “already seven o’clock!” after glancing up at an analog clock with Roman numerals.
It was 5:00. Oops. Flipped that around a bit. That drew a few well-deserved wisecracks and laughter.
It’s a good thing I don’t drink alcohol. I’m able to remain clear-headed during these kinds of foibles, allowing me to chronicle them accurately for posterity.
We have no responsibilities to do anything different today, but I’ve heard a trip to Grand Rapids to eat at a restaurant is possible. I doubt Asher will be too thrilled with that plan, since it will involve him staying here alone, but I suspect we can reward him with a big explore later around our hosts’ other wooded property, just a short drive from their cabin.
Sometimes great adventures involve a little sacrifice.
.
.
Snowy Walk
By 4:00 yesterday afternoon, it was a winter wonderland outside. Cyndie and I set out to feed the horses by way of a walk through the woods with Asher.
We found a lot of branches drooping across the trails under the weight of the sticky, wet snow. It didn’t take Asher long to get out of sight as we trudged through the snow. We resorted to taking pictures of each other.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
When we popped out of the trees, Asher’s silhouette appeared in the distance.
He was having a blast in the snow. Earlier in the afternoon, Cyndie decided to open the door and let Asher outside by himself to romp while she stayed warm and dry inside. That has not been our normal practice, so it was pleasing to find he stayed close and came back in when called.
The snow was coming down with intimidating intensity as we made our way to the horses. We decided I should do a mid-storm plowing of the driveway after cleaning up manure.
I learned very quickly that the treatment I applied to the blade was entirely ineffective. The snow was wet against the ground and heavy to push with the plow blade. I had to get off and scrape the blade clean multiple times.
The extra work last night will have been worth it if the plowing is easier this morning. It certainly can’t be any worse.
One thing I have no complaints about, big snow events are wonderfully picturesque to view.
.
.
Relative Something 