Posts Tagged ‘planning’
Shifting Priorities
I have not attempted to do anything with the remains of the woodshed yet. Since it wasn’t raining yesterday afternoon, I stepped out to take some more pictures.
It is too heavy to lift on my own, so I will either need a lot of helpers to pick it back up or use the power of our diesel tractor. The problem with relying on the tractor is that I can’t drive it back there until the ground dries up enough to support it. Not that it’s really a problem. I have plenty of other things to work on while I wait to be able to drive the tractor around on our property.
I have noticed a strong desire to get back to clearing the south drainage ditch, but the lawn grass that we try to keep mowed around the driveway and township road is growing so fast I was forced to make that the next priority. It is a rather challenging task right now because of how wet it is. I tried to stay off the worst areas, but still found myself getting stuck a few times, and leaving muddy tire tracks in my wake. Regardless, it looks better mowed with a few tracks, than it does not-mowed at all.
Clearing the south ditch is not the only thing clamoring for my attention, either. Over the weekend I started creating a spot by our labyrinth to use for storing compost that we plan to feed the growing things we have planted. I have been ever-so-slowly replacing the concrete landscaping blocks Cyndie bought for marking the first layout of the labyrinth, with stones we have been collecting from around our property. I am going to build a 3-walled nook using the landscape blocks pulled from the labyrinth, to contain the compost.
Of course, to haul manure back there I will need the ATV and trailer, but I can’t get in the paddocks with that equipment until it dries up some and Cyndie gets off crutches to open gates and manage horses while I drive in and out.
That’ll probably happen about the time I will need to switch priorities again to mow the rapidly growing lawn grass everywhere. It’s a great exercise for the part of me that wants to do everything in a sequence. I get to flex my flexibility skills, instead.
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Uninvited Situations
As April draws to a close, we would like to be preparing our minds for the transition that May should offer toward connecting us to summer. Instead, we are feeling shriveled and wrinkly from 6 inches of rain in 6 days. The events and situations of the last few days are beginning to take a toll. I think one of my unconscious responses is to clench my jaw more than usual. I have been trying to practice better awareness of that habit. Each time I catch myself clenching, I am startled at the discovery. How is it that I so easily start pressing without realizing it? I can’t help but wonder about how often I do it and fail to notice.
Our house feels uncomfortably out of whack, because I haphazardly pulled furniture out of the far end of the sunroom and stashed it anywhere and everywhere to get things out from under the leaks.
One of our garage doors is so water-logged, the electric opener can’t lift it. When I pulled the release handle, a pin popped out and now the bracket hangs loose, and swings menacingly.
Cyndie reported that she discovered one of the boards of the wall separating Legacy and Cayenne’s stalls in the barn was wrenched loose and lying in Legacy’s stall yesterday morning. She thought Legacy had done it, but I am suspicious of Cayenne, as she appeared to be working on the next board down while I was in there feeding them and freshening their water buckets. I’m gonna need longer screws.
After throwing one of Delilah’s toys for a series of “fetch” exercises before dinner, she walked past me on one ‘retrieve’ and stepped into the wading pool where we often wash her before letting her in the house. Pretty smart way to let me know she is ready to go in. After we got inside, I toweled her off and noticed she started to favor her left front foot, sometimes drastically avoiding putting any weight on it. She went from walking fine, to limping obviously, in an instant.
I have developed my first poison ivy rash of the season, on the inside of both arms, very consistent with the most likely source being contact with Delilah’s fur.
When I got home from work yesterday, I noticed something on the floor in front of the kitchen sink. There were six small ball bearings in one spot. I deduced that they must be from the pull-out waste basket under the sink, but I have no idea why or how.
These kinds of little uninvited situations start to have a cumulative effect, but they are probably small potatoes compared to what is really weighing on my mind. Today I will be driving Cyndie to an appointment to have an arthroscopic procedure done to clean up her hip-joint. She will be confined to crutches for an uncertain amount of time.
It sure would do us wonders to have the rain end and get a little warm sunshine beaming down on us soon. It would at least be one less reason to grit my teeth.
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Field Work
Even though it rained a bit yesterday morning, the rest of the day turned out sunny, warm, and breezy. I think we even made some small additional progress toward the ground drying out. I may be rushing things a bit, but we are driven to try to get the earliest start possible on preparing and improving our fields for hay and grazing, so I worked tenaciously to get out and do some cutting while the weather was good. We want to cut off weeds right away and give the grasses a head start toward dominating.
That meant I needed to finally complete the project I started months ago, of cleaning the bottom of the mower deck. I pulled it out into the sunshine, where I was unfortunately better able to see how much had been missed of the portions I already scraped. I sprayed it all down with a potion to inhibit grass from sticking and then mounted it beneath the lawn tractor. I was ready to mow.
The growth in this field was just a bit more than suits this mower, but it performed heroically. The two fields we want to use for grazing this summer have been left to grow wild for some time. When we got here they were 3 or 4 feet high with grasses, weeds and volunteer trees. For the past two years, I have knocked them down in the fall using the brush cutter pulled behind the diesel tractor, but I was hesitant to make a real close cut. Part of the reason is the sticks and branches that lie tangled and hidden in the grass, and part is because the terrain is pretty rough in spots.
I settled on using the lawn tractor because the ground is still too soft to drive the big tractor on without the tires cutting deep ruts. It seemed dry enough to support the lawn tractor without the wheels causing damage, and we’ve tried to pick the obvious sticks out, so it was time to see if the lawn tractor could navigate the bumps and heavy growth.
After a tentative start worked okay, we went all in and cut a pretty big section. That area also included a bald spot where we had burned a couple of brush piles, so while Cyndie finished the mowing, I got the Grizzly out and dragged a rake over the dirt/mud. Then we hooked up a seed spreader to the lawn tractor and laid down some pasture grass seed.
I looks mighty fine out there after just a few hours of work, but one thing leads to another, and now it’s time to figure out how to fence that area to contain the grazing horses we are working so hard to accommodate.
It is pretty clear from their behavior, they would like that to happen very soon.
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Days Filled
Natural processes never pause. We had a very spring-like day yesterday, starting the morning with a classic thunder shower. By the end of the day, I couldn’t see any snow left on the ground as I walked the southern fence line to repair areas where Legacy practiced his penchant for dismantling things with his teeth. The frost hasn’t gone out of the ground yet, but already there are green sprouts emerging from the dirt.
A trek around the property is an overwhelming experience of discovering all the things that deserve attention. The trick is picking the best time for each task. The terrain is too wet for many activities, but the high ground is getting close to dry enough for equipment to drive over it without leaving giant ruts. Mornings can still offer frozen ground, which invites the possibility of driving over areas that will be too muddy later in the day. Any day could bring rain, or even snow, which will quickly cause a setback in the progress of drying out the land.
We need more gravel brought in, and will want to find fill dirt to bolster areas that were excavated last year and experienced some dramatic settling in the time since. With the ground as soft as it is, we cause more damage than we want if we ask for deliveries of sand, gravel, or dirt during this time of year. Instead, I’ve resorted to using some of the broken down winter manure and mud scraped up in the paddocks to fill one spot that settled. If it works out, there’s plenty more where that came from.
With nature forging ahead every minute without pause, it becomes imperative that we fill our days with activities to keep pace. There is no shortage of work to do to occupy our time. I find myself mentally battling dread that I am neglecting things here when I have a low energy day, finding myself short of motivation to take on the next task. It gets compounded when I consider that I also want to take personal time for getting miles on the bike and playing the guitar; two hobbies of several that I used to do when I had spare time for such exploits.
There is consolation in the fact that I enjoy the projects we have underway, and receive deep satisfaction from the improvements we achieve. It may be a false impression, but I think there should be less demands on our time in the long run, after we accomplish all the projects of shaping the land, installing fencing, and constructing rooms and sheds. In fact, we have more behind us than remains in front of us, with regard to those issues.
We are close enough to reaching a point of only needing to manage day-to-day operations such that I’m feeling hope it is within reach. It may be another year or two, but that’s not all that long in the span of a lifetime. In addition, it’s not something that just happens in an instant, so the work that fills our days now will subtly transition over time, becoming more routine and efficient, and thus, less all-encompassing.
Or, so I can try to convince myself.
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Construction Complete
We are pleased and excited to have accomplished changes to the basement of our house that we have envisioned since we first arrived. I talked frequently with family and friends about the idea of ripping out the corner entertainment center and building a larger storage room with a door, fishing for insight on what might be involved and whether it was something I could do myself. Then our window upstairs fractured.
That was the catalyst that initiated my search for someone in our vicinity who could do home construction projects. The job to replace the window was such a minor project that it wasn’t all that attractive to a builder, but when I threw in the possibility of also building a storage room downstairs, I found someone to take the bait. It was a perfect match.
Dodge Construction is one semi-retired Randy Dodge, who lives nearby and has built many homes. I was pointed to Randy by the local Andersen Window dealer, who gave the builder a stellar recommendation —believable because Randy built the dealer’s house. On top of having a career’s worth of skills, Randy happens to be a great guy. We agreed on a verbal definition of the project and locked in the deal with a handshake. Logic would dictate that is not a safe way to do business, but my instincts indicated there was little risk in this case.
Randy and his frequent accomplice, Isaac, knocked out the project with relative ease, repeatedly revealing tools and skills that made me exceedingly grateful to have not tried to do this myself. Plus, they designed on the fly, leading to improvements and enhancements that were well beyond my ability to conceive.
While we had them here, we asked if they might finish two rough openings that remained to our sunroom, where we had pulled out windows when we first moved in.
Randy took one look at that and suggested we consider a Formica surface across the bottom. He said he would look for something that might work. I was shocked to see that he brought us a section of counter top that was amazingly similar to our kitchen granite counters, relying solely on his memory. The finished product looks fabulous.
So, we have a new window, newly finished pass-through openings to the sunroom, and a completely finished storage room of built-in shelves in the basement. It is time to begin cleaning up sawdust, sheetrock dust, and putting things back into storage. This time, on shelves!
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Making Room
When the weather is nasty cold outside, and hours of daylight are short, one way to deal with it is to work on indoor projects. We have a project waiting for us in our basement that is finally seeing some progress. Interestingly, that progress came as a result of the fracturing of the triangular window beside our stone chimney.
In order to raise the level of interest for a builder to travel to our home to replace the broken window, we tossed in the construction of a storage room in our basement as added incentive. It worked. The replacement window is now on order and when it comes, the builder expects to be available to work on creating a walk-in storage room with built-in shelves in the space where the entertainment center once was.
When we moved in, I did some initial demolition in that corner, taking out the shelving to open up the angled space as much as possible for temporary storage. The only parts left were studs with drywall attached to them. Cyndie masterfully stowed a roomful of stuff into the small space of that corner and then hung curtains across the front to cover the cut-out spaces once filled by a television and speakers.
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In preparation of the builder taking down the studs and putting up new walls to make a more functional storage space, I pulled off the drywall and removed all the screws from the studs. Friday night, Cyndie and I removed all the stuff that was stacked behind that wall and piled it up around the basement. It is a real optical illusion of space to see that little corner empty, but the contents now appearing to consume the entire rest of the room.
We need to rearrange things now to create a clear working space for the builder, with a path for him to bring in materials, and then we will be ready when that window shows up and our project reaches the top in his queue of work.
That done, I guess it’s time to go back outside and play in the snow! How nasty can it really be out there?
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Opportunity Aplenty
Here are some of the issues that are crowding my realm of possibilities this morning:
Our male cat, Mozyr, has fallen into the behavior of peeing on our bed. I’ve been told that once that gets started, it is unlikely to change. We must deal with this immediately. I hate that stench.
We are getting more than enough urine smell from our manure pile. I had no idea what was involved with manure management, and I’m thinking now that the spot we selected seems undersized. I still feel like the location we selected is good, even though the smell sometimes wafts up toward the house, but I fear we may need to take out a few additional trees to expand the square footage.
Speaking of taking out trees, I now have all the equipment to do some serious lumberjacking and there is a dead tree on a corner of our property by the road. It is a chore that is overdue to have been started. Every day that goes by, the task feels more delinquent.
We spent time yesterday testing out the Grizzly ATV for assisting with cleaning up manure in the paddocks, with mixed results. The manure is frozen in multiple layers and much of it covered in snow. We tried both dragging the rake and pushing with the blade. Each seemed to make improvements, but manure that gets collected still needs to be scooped up and moved. That remains and laborious and lengthy endeavor.
I’m supposed to be clearing out our storage corner in the basement. In my search for a solution to the fractured triangular window beside the fireplace, I have connected with a local builder who stopped by to measure for the replacement. Over the phone I mentioned that we also were interested in having a storage room built in our basement. That seemed to go a long way toward enticing him to take on the window replacement. Now I need to get that space ready for the basement work to commence.
It is now nearing the middle of January and I never got around to preparing engines for winter storage. I understand that the primary reason engines fail to run well, or to even start, is leaving old gas in them over the off-season. I am my own worst enemy there. I have a hard time keeping my engines running properly, because I have a hard time getting myself to prepare them for the months of storage.
I took the mower deck off the little Craftsman garden tractor last fall, then flipped it over to be cleaned and to remove the blades for sharpening. It remains where I placed it, untouched.
I’ve got a half-built fence awaiting my attention down the hill from the house. The first snow of the season put that project on hold, but when it’s not bitterly cold, there is progress that could still be made there. I’m afraid the fence has gotten lost in the blur of other work that needs attention.
Meanwhile, we have plans for a Wintervale web site to market Cyndie’s services as a leadership trainer and to offer seminars and retreats here. The “under-construction” image is as far as we’ve gotten.
I’m sequential in nature, so I’d like to go back and get the first things done, so I can move on to the next few, but life doesn’t work like that. I’m back to playing “Whack-a-Mole” with whatever pops up in the moment.
Yesterday, since I had the Grizzly out, I ran it up and down the driveway to clear off the drifts that had developed over the week of historically cold temperatures. It was pleasing to so quickly and easily “whack” something from the list.
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Mulling Possibilities
I spent some time trying out my hedge idea yesterday, and whether it ultimately proves adequate for a fence, or not, at least it looks a whole lot better. It also will make it easier to mow all the way up to that border.
Unfortunately, this thicket of mostly buckthorn doesn’t run all the way to the road. There are a couple open spots along the way, so we will still need a fence in those places.
This frustrates me a bit. We need to put up fence for part of that border, but we want to keep as much existing growth as possible, which pretty much prohibits us being able to route any fence through the worst of it.
There is always the possibility that we could locate that northern border fence of the grazing pasture just inside the “hedge line” I am creating, but doing so would, over time, be construed as the property line, which I’d rather not see happen.
This may be an ‘either/or’ situation that I am trying to conform to a ‘both/and’ outcome. There is also the fact that by trying to turn that thicket into a hedge, I have created another task that will need attention during the growing season. To keep it looking nice, it will need to be trimmed regularly. Of course, if the horses can reach it, they will be happy to trim it for me.
The hedge shows potential. I’ll see what Cyndie says when she returns, and together we will mull over the possibilities. But like I wrote above, regardless what we decide, it sure looks a whole lot better now that it has been trimmed.
Buried Wires
Our search to locate the rusty old barbed wired fence that demarcated the northern border of our property has reached a temporary pause. We made it to the end of one section of visible rusted T-posts and wires, but now the wires disappear beneath years, maybe decades, of eroded soil that makes its way down the slope from a plowed field above.
I tried pulling up on the wires, but they are so old and rusted, especially having been buried for years, they just broke. I ventured ahead, further along our property line to a new section of scrub brush, to find someplace where the wires show up above ground again, hoping to work my way back from the other direction. What I found was a batch of grape vines so thick that it makes the thorny area we had previously been working in seem like a luxury.
On the positive side, it appears we could grow grapes! This vine sure looks fruitful! Maybe if I give it good attention for a few years, pruning and supporting it, I could nurture a harvest-able crop. Fresh squeezed grape juice would be a real treat.
I did also find where the wires come up out of the ground onto another T-post. As I followed the wires into the ground there, I discovered that they can’t be pulled up from this direction because they are now running beneath years of growth of the thick wood shoots of the grape vines.
At this point, my plan is to just run our new fence in a line between the last posts I did locate. 
The property line is supposed to be straight, anyway, so there’s no real mystery as to where the fence should be. And, there is no sense digging up the buried barbed wire, just to get rid of it. In this case, buried wire is the same as no wire at all.
I have also decided that for the remainder of the thick sections in the direction toward the street, we can forego trying to cut away enough brush to put a fence down the middle, and instead, just use the entire mass of trees as our fence. I will trim the branches on our side so they form a clean line, creating the impression of a tall hedge.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see if my idea works after I spend many hours and a lot of energy pruning trees to test it out.
Healthy Perspective
It would be so great if we could get it all done. There are dead trees to be cut down, logs to be split, a trail to be improved, the round pen needs to be graded/raked, there is rusty barbed wire to be removed and new fencing to be installed in its place, waterways need to be cleared, motors need maintenance, paddocks need to be cleaned, horses need attention, our web site stalled at the “under construction” page… It goes on and on.
The challenge is to maintain a state of mind that is at peace with the reality of right now. 
There will always be more to do than we are able to get done. Each moment deserves our best selves to be present, regardless any number of unfinished projects awaiting our attention. There is an art to maintaining a healthy perspective about what matters most, and being able to radiate a positive peacefulness to people and animals around us.
It is not an art that I have strong skills at practicing, but I am motivated by a desire to not be the guy who short changes himself and others by devaluing the present moment by excessively fretting over all the things that haven’t happened yet.
Relative Something 