Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Dirty Pants
If I venture outside on our property, especially if I expect to traverse the horse paddocks, I will trash my pants with mud. When we walk in the door, we remove our muddy boots, but my pant legs will sometimes be just as bad as the boots. I have been known to remove my pants at the door, too.
It doesn’t make sense to me to put these in the wash every day, as the next pair I put on will get just as dirty in a single outing, so I have taken to wearing the same pair for days, or even weeks. They pretty much stand up by themselves after a day or two.
When I decide to finally wash them, I will lay the pants on the driveway and spray the mud off with a hose, before running them through our washing machine. They get that bad.
It feels a little weird to be saving my dirty pants at the end of each night. It’s even weirder to be climbing back into them the following day. I have to be delicate about sliding them up when putting my boots on, to minimize how much debris breaks loose and falls on the floor, or into my boot. When I come in for lunch, I can’t sit on the couch or nice chair, and try to step carefully around the house.
Our cat, Pequenita, isn’t bothered by the mud at all, and climbs on my leg regardless how grimy they are. As an indoor cat, it’s her chance to be close to the earth.
I suppose I could step into the kiddie pool we have out the front door for washing Delilah before she comes in the house. It seems only fair. Of course, the mud I get covered with is incidental to the tasks I get involved in, whereas Delilah’s mud is a result of her deliberately getting herself into the worst areas and marching back and forth or digging. She needs daily washing —sometimes multiple washings in a single day.
My system of keeping dirty pants gives me many more wearings between eventual necessary washes.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Nature’s Course
If you live on a river, or have ever paid attention to flood stages, you are probably aware of the time it can take for a river to crest. That phenomena is playing out in our paddocks now, as the first day of sunshine after the dreadful week of soaking rains produced wetness and mud that is the worst we have seen. There will be a time-lag before we get the drying for which we so dearly yearn.
The horses are beginning to show some impatience with not only the enduring mud, but probably more so, the wait to get on the fresh green grass they can see all around their corral. I began work on installing temporary fencing to allow them limited access to some grazing just outside their paddock, and was able to push the posts in most of the way by hand because the ground is so saturated. Even if I get the fence up, we can’t put them out there until it firms up enough to support their weight without them churning it into a mud bath like the sacrifice area of their paddocks.
After the rain finally stopped, and the temperature rose out of the 40s, I took the blankets off the horses. They really wanted to be brushed after that, even though a couple of them played hard to get and made us wait out a few dance moves of avoidance before settling down so we could go to work. Yesterday, I got a hint that we didn’t give them as much brushing as they wanted. Cayenne and Hunter took it upon themselves to cooperatively work on removing each other’s shedding coats.
When I first spotted them, I was amazed at the vigor with which each horse worked. It was so obviously a joint operation of sheer pleasure that I found myself mesmerized and wondering if I should maybe be embarrassed about peeping at their moment of shared passion. Hunter’s mouth was open, teeth bared, and he was grinding back and forth on Cayenne’s flank, bringing up vast tufts of hair that easily rivaled what our brushing produces. She was working with equal intensity on his back.
It was as vivid a presentation of “you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” as I have ever seen. It was such a classic scene that I figured I should take a picture, but I hesitated, figuring it would be over by the time I pulled out my phone. After staring at them with increasing fascination for a couple of minutes, it occurred to me that I could have long ago had my phone out for pictures. I snapped a few, but of course, none of them really do the scene adequate justice.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Not Funny
I wish I could laugh about it, but we are suddenly prisoners of our cat Mozyr. Whatever the heck his urinary tract problem is, the solution he seems to have selected is to pee on our bed. More specifically, Cyndie’s side of our bed. Could he be sending her a message? I don’t know.
Poor guy. We know he is not well. After a vet visit on Monday, we have special food to give him, and he was given fluids, and also something for pain. His response is to turn his nose up at the food, and to pee on our bed. Seriously, three times Monday night. The second time, while Cyndie was sleeping. That chased her out to the couch in the middle of the night. In the morning, while I was still in bed, sitting up with my computer, I suddenly realized he was sitting on the bed next to me. That can’t be good. Sure enough, he had peed, soaking through to the mattress. I guess the hydration at the vet worked.
It gave us a great excuse to do some serious spring cleaning. Too bad that we had already just done this over the previous weekend, due to the same problem.
I waited all day before putting the mattress back down, because I just didn’t want to give him another opportunity. When Cyndie got home, she pulled out a clean mattress pad and tossed it on the box springs that I had laid back into position.
I walked into the room to lay the mattress back on the box springs, and picked up the pad to move it. Mozyr had just peed on it. That pad hadn’t been there more than a few minutes. I’ve spoken to two people who told me that a cat would be out the door so darn fast if it had peed on their bed. I’m finding that I wish I had some of that in me.
On the bright side, it got me to dig out the clothesline for the first time this year.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
No Foolin’
I think we just might have gotten past the messiest part of the spring snow melt season yesterday. At least, that’s what the optimist in me is hanging his hopes on. It is hard to shake the memory of that 18 inch snowfall that buried us last May and significantly prolonged the drying out of our property last year, but something is telling me that won’t be our plight this year.
A remarkable amount of ground made its first appearance of 2014 during yesterday’s dose of warmth and wind. We were blessed with two separate periods of relatively light rainfall which is always a big help in melting the snow pack. I was able to make my way along a good portion of our southern property line and was thrilled to find that the new culvert we installed, along with the preliminary improvements to open up the drainage ditch, are functioning brilliantly. It is easy to see where we should continue, and I have renewed inspiration and confidence about what I want to do next to maximize the benefits possible in helping our land drain in a controlled way.
The channel I made on Sunday is still in place at the edge of the southern ditch. Looking back up toward where all the water is coming from, you can see how much it wants to spread out now. One of my goals this summer will be to dig out a more defined creek bed across this field with our tractor, and then soften the edges to a gentle slope, and seed it with grass. Most of the year it will simply be a dry depression, only filling with water during the snow melt or a significant rainfall.
Our water-loving dog, Delilah, is mad about helping me get the water to flow. She runs up and down the channels and tries to bite the water wherever it ripples or gurgles. I like it when she helps down here because the ground isn’t muddy and the water is clean, so she just gets wet. The running back and forth does wonders to burn off her otherwise endless energy. When we came in, I toweled her off as she lay on her back, and then she curled up with the towel and took a nap.
On my way back to the house, I plodded past the labyrinth and discovered an interesting phenomenon. The melting snow is creating an inverse image as compared to the way it looked when I was shoveling the route in winter. It takes longer for packed snow to melt, so the path that I repeatedly trekked with snow shoes is now taller than the border areas of stones. They appear as depressions between the paths now.
It’s true. I’m not just saying that because it’s April 1st. Seriously.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
No Rest
We are now in the season of mud and ice. In the mornings, everything that was squishy and flowing the night before ends up frozen solid. Morning is the best time to get certain things done that require traffic in our wettest areas. After the sun shines on the ground for any length of time, travel around here gets pretty sketchy. I don’t know how the horses put up with it.
Well, actually, I do know one way they deal with it. They lay down and roll in the mud. Shortly after being brushed yesterday, 3 of the 4 laid down and massaged their backs with the manure laced mud. It does wonders for Legacy’s light complexion.
Yesterday was a day of chores for us, and we were blessed by a visit from Elysa and Anne, who helped out with several tasks. In addition to brushing the horses and helping Cyndie clean part of one paddock, they joined us up on the hill of the big field where we took early action on the recently exposed ground.
There were piles of manure that needed to be spread out and broken up, sticks to be collected and removed, weeds to be cut down, and pasture grass seed to be spread. We are hoping to improve the potential of growing desirable grasses, with less weeds, so we can cut it for hay.
The highlight of the day for me was getting water to flow off our property and into the drainage ditch along our southern border. We were getting little rivers of water running from everywhere as the snow melted, but toward the lower portions of our land, it was spreading out and pooling up in the slushy snow that remained. I took a spade shovel and headed down there with Delilah.
The water was almost over my boots in some places, making it quite a challenge to navigate digging a channel out of the slush to provide the water with a straight shot into the creek of runoff that was now flowing along our property border. Because of the way water-follows-water, I like to give it a path that creates enough momentum of flow that the uphill pools get pulled down to fill the void. It’s a lot like priming a pump.
But flowing water is fickle, and if the momentum is slowed by a dam of slush that collects, the water is more than happy to pick an alternate route, or it may simply stop flowing altogether.
The last chore we squeezed into the day was painting the drywall of our new storage room. It got a coat in the morning and another one after dinner to get ready for the finishing touches by our builder this week.
It was the kind of day that leaves you needing another day of the weekend, so you can take a day off to recover. The problem with that is, if we had another day of the weekend, we’d likely end up using it to get even more chores done. There is no rest for the weary.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Topsy Turvy
I don’t know what it is, spring weather, phase of the moon, tax return preparation, college basketball tournament upsets, or blog hosting sites putting their users through unwanted drama, but things seem a bit chaotic around here recently. It doesn’t help that I am once again on leave from the day-job due to another slowdown in business. Then, there are things like the commercial airplane disappearance, the massive mud slide, Chicago’s commuter train crash, and our dog and cats getting the throw-ups. At least the horses are fine, well… except we received a classic spring rain/snow mix that got them chilled and wet yesterday, so that we needed to move them into the barn for the night.
I captured this picture of one of Delilah’s toys recently, and when I opened it up for viewing on my computer screen, it immediately caused me to think, “That’s exactly what I feel like.”
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Lake Wintervale
.
This time of year, there’s water, water, everywhere. Can you guess where this is?
.
Go ahead, click on the image…
.
.
.
.
.
Photo Op
Shot yesterday during a visit to our neighbor’s farm. Sure, they had animals, but there I go, looking up and capturing building and sky. I am short of words after allowing myself to be taken on a journey of films last night after watching the celebration by the people who make them, The Academy Awards.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Relative Something 